JHK’s Three-Act Play, Big Slide
A log mansion in the Adirondack Mountains…
A big family on the run…
A nation in peril…
Visit the Big Slide Page to order, perform, or see sample scenes.

Ho ho ho! It’s that time of year again. Here’s JHK’s holiday classic: A Christmas Orphan.

11-year-old Jeff Greenaway hears his mom and dad argue one night after an office Christmas party. He infers from their garbled squabble that he is an orphan, found in a willow basket on the welcome mat outside their New York apartment. Thinking now that his parents are imposters, he steals away to Grand Central Station and buys a train ticket to Drakesville, Vermont, where he intends to start life all over again.Print | Kindle | Kobo (Digital) | Barnes & Noble (Digital)

The toils of summer are bygone now. The days grow shorter and America stands in the darkling road of its own prospects like a dumb animal frozen in the blinding light of approaching fury. The White House must be a strange place these days with the management of the USA turned over to astrologasters, alchemists, prayer-wheel spinners, fakirs, viziers, necromancers and other visitors from occult realms unaffiliated with the dominion of reality.

One of these characters, Ms. Christina Romer, at a luncheon celebrating her departure as chief of the White House Council of Economic Advisors (i.e. readers of spilled goat innards) even blurted out that she had no idea what’s been going on in banking and business and how come America can’t be more like it was in 1999. Don’t cry for Christina. A cushy chair awaits her at the Hogwarts Berkeley outpost where she can repose in a trance of unknowing until California slides into its own tar pit of default and disintegration.

It’s all a mystery in Washington. Nobody can figure out what happened to their green-eyed champion called Growth, that savior who rights all wrongs and insures our eternal exception from the sad fates of other less-blessed empires. Isn’t there a book of conjures somewhere in the Harvard Business School that guarantee perpetual growth — even if there are different tomes around the campus that describe the essential tragic nature of life, viz., that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end to everything. And while this might not be the end of the human project in North America, it is certainly the end of the cheap oil abbondanza, and everything spun off of it in the way of mass consumer luxury, with air-conditioning and a cherry on top.

My own view — I might be wrong– is that we are going through an epochal compressive contraction, which is the opposite of growth. Money is disappearing because debts are being welshed on in such a volume that all the digital dollars conjured out of chief wizard Ben Bernanke’s magic booty box are but empty spells cast into a hurricane of broken promises. This is no Hurricane Earl – which stared into the discharge tube of Lloyd Blankfein’s cappuccino machine and skidded off whimpering into the fogs of Newfoundland. This economic contraction storm has a long way to go, and it will be taking the USA on a strange journey, a trip more marvelous and hazard-fraught than the trek across the Oregon Trail — and the destination may be a strange country where promises are taken seriously. What an idea!

In the meantime, the managers of US polity, Mr. Barack Obama and Company, look to continue scattering goat innards on the new carpet in the Oval Office in their desperate seeking for a miraculous return to the non-stop celebration that was ringing through the nation a decade ago. Any moment now, the President will announce some new “program” aimed at propping up house prices — in order, you understand, to allow banks to pretend that they are still solvent. It won’t do a thing for the poor schlemiels who already paid way too much for a house, and it won’t do a thing for anyone looking to buy a house with a shrinking income, but it’s probably what he’ll do, along perhaps with some other cockamamie flim-flams, like temporarily suspending the payroll tax so the American people can stock up on Cheez Doodles and beer for the football festival known as Thanksgiving. I have a better idea: put a seven-trillion-dollar tax on Lloyd Blankfein’s cappuccino machine.

I voted for Barack Obama. I don’t know about you, but I’m a tad disappointed in how things turned out with him. These days he makes Millard Fillmore look like Frederick the Great. His speech last week on Iraq and, incidentally, economic matters, was such a puffery of hollow platitudes that I was a little surprised he didn’t go up in a vapor at the end of it like a genie and retreat inside his desk lamp in a little trail of steam. Nobody can figure out why he keeps the same krewe of viziers at his elbow after all these months of failure to engage with reality. The voters were expecting a champion and got a Labradoodle instead.

Not that his political adversaries are any better. In fact, I wouldn’t depend on John Boehner to pull a straight furrow in three feet of dry loam, or Mitch McConnell to tie his own shoelaces and chew gum at the same time but its certainly reassuring to know that Sarah Palin is waiting offstage to enter the 2012 national beauty pageant and that all of America can stop wasting money on education now that Fox News has installed a blackboard on Glenn Beck’s soundstage.

Let me tell you exactly what is going on “out there.” The so-called developed world is watching two giant forces race each other to put an end to business-as-usual for industrial civilization. These two forces are the catastrophe of debt and predicament of oil supplies. They had been running neck-and-neck for a few years, but now the catastrophe of debt is pulling slightly ahead. But even this is an illusion because these two forces are actually hitched in tandem, with the rickety cart of civilization bouncing perilously behind them, and whatever one of these forces does will affect the other. Bad debt will eventually cripple the global oil industry’s ability to perform, and the failures of the oil industry will only amplify the killing force of debt. It’s that simple.

And the simple moral of the story is that the only sane thing America can do is simplify itself, de-complexify its dangerously hyper-complex organs of daily life. I’ve stated them before but, briefly, this means simplifying the way we do farming, commerce, transportation, inhabiting the landscape, schooling, medicine, and banking. Everything we do to add additional layers of complexity to these already tottering systems will guarantee an eventual orgy of blood and material destruction to this land. Everything we do to prop up the unsustainable instead of reconstructing the armatures of everyday life will make American life a nightmare in a very few years ahead.

It must be the case that President Obama and the other denizens of high places do not have a clue what I might mean by all this — though I am hardly the only one advancing this set of ideas and it is not really radical considering the alternatives. But our leaders’ foolish intransigence insures a political convulsion that will follow the onset of an involuntary restructuring that can’t be avoided anymore, because reality has mandates of its own, and is closer to God than all the hosts of our ridiculous politics.

___________________________________

The sequel to my 2008 novel of post-oil America, World Made By Hand, is shipping to booksellers now. Order via AMAZON.

About James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

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The government and the Federal Reserve are fighting against the laws of mathematics and physics: this is why we can be so confident that they will lose. With any other opponent it would be a tough call, but it is mathematics they are fighting against this time. There is no match.goldsubject.com/the-gold-deflation-double-whammy/

Good post today. The last paragraph describes the problem very well but the issue is that it is not popular to tell people the truth about the way they live their lives and will usually result in a loss on election day. Just ask Jimmy Carter.
This is the problem with the Obama administration. They recognize that telling people the truth, that we have to simplify and live more reasonable lives (like say goodbye to the 10 mpg super SUV) is not going to get them reelected so they end up saying what people want to hear. I still think Obama has better days ahead but I have a feeling the bottom is going to have to really fall out of the economy first.

Yes, Jim, the writing is on the for sale signs. It says ‘Reduced’. The boarded-up store windows in the city are multiplying. Out here in the sticks more and more of us are getting that local is the way to go. Our mayoral campaign is based on it. It tickles me to find simple things like locally grown and milled bread flour. Getting the year’s supply of local garlic so we don’t have to depend on the Chinese crap is another small pleasure. I’m watching the odd dream dissolve into hard realities, but people can be resilient. We need to support each other in that!
Lynn10in10diet.com/
Diet for a small footprint and a small grocery bill

The problem in Kunstler’s shtick is that you don’t simply devolve a hyper-complex system called industrial civilization. There’s no guide here to such an epochal undertaking. Buzzwords won’t do it. You won’t localize or simplify this thing. Now, Kunstler may well be right that there’s a world of pain coming our way. But that pain will be convulsive whether we do the job or the job does us.
I agree Obama is a disappointment. But we knew that any president would have to commit to keeping this racket going. Obama never promised not to! And for all you Teabagging idiots who are waiting in the wings to fart your conspiracy theories, why not ask Sister Sarah or Brother Glenn how they would do it. Kill all the blacks? C’mon. There’s no Million Moron March that can take you back to Mayberry. That trip was always a hallucination.

I too voted for O’Bama only to give up the political capital he had gained by allowing congress to dither away all hope of health and ecconimic reform that is worable.
My only thought is hang on it is going to be a rough ride.

Yes, we will continue to drag this nation along in it’s current overburdened form. We will continue to fill out more paperwork so that one more semi-literate government flunkie can keep their unnecessary job. We will consume every single drop of consumable oil, then fight to the death for the most difficult to reach scraps.
In her current form, society has devolved in to a sound-bite nation of TV addled zombies, merely going through the motions for one more week…..one more paycheck.
This tragedy that we have become will grow worse with each successive presidency, sure to be held by the smooth talking, charming candidate chosen by corporate America, now that their right to “free speech” has been affirmed.
I weep for my children.
By the way, I just finished Witch of Hebron.
Outstanding.

Greetings,
You’ve got to love the Law of Unintended Consequences. The only thing they could think to do to help California was to give us money for “shovel ready” road projects. This, I imagine, was supposed to stimulate our economy but has had an entirely different outcome.
First, traffic is even worse than before as road construction and lane closures has brought our freeways to a halt. How much time and money is wasted waiting around in this giant parking lot? Also, the motorists are now fined double because everywhere they drive is a construction zone and any tickets they receive are now double in cost.
I suspect that there are lots of “unintended consequences” headed our way out here in the Golden State. Maybe the 1/2 trillion in State Pension obligations we tax payers owe? After all, within a few short years, retirement and education will eat up 97% of our state budget.
Speaking of budgets, we do not have one out here because no one can figure out how deal with the fact that we’re tens of billions of dollars short this year and the State has run out of options for dealing with the problem.
Our State will soon have to either stiff the bond holders of our debt or close all offices other than tax collection. What a mess.

Ha yeah simplify. Both you and Denninger have good ideas on how to solve our problems. And I’m glad you blog about them. But Congress is a bought out criminal organization. They have the active goal of destroying the economy to force us to be MORE dependent on government. This brings them more power. And more of our money to grab. I hope this collapse your expecting happens sooner rather than later…It would be much better for the average citizen to get it over with and start over. The Republican and Democratic parties both need to be abolished along with the Fed and the IRS.

The Brotherhood of Darkness have us right where they want us. This depression did not happen by accident.
The government could and by could I mean they have the right to, issue greenbacks instead of relying on the Fed’s debt backed dollars. But O’bama knows he can’t do that and expect to be a viable candidate next time around. The banks and corporations have taken over the government.
All of the debt was meant to complete the process of turning us into wage slaves. Mission Accomplished. Most people however do not know they are in chains.
Aimlow Joe was here.http://www.aimlow.com

This guy has an important voice. I’m half way through The Witch of Hebron, taking my time because it’s such a good read. He can crack you up with irony like Lenny Bruce and tells a story like Larry McMurtry. My strategy is buying his books to keep him writing.

Hey I like Glenn Beck, If I was going out for a beer I’d rather go with Beck than Harry Reid, as an example, and Sarah is a doll. Yeh she is not qualified to be President (but aren’t we use to that?) but in the future USA that you described her skills may make her the perfect leader.
I love your post. I read it every week. Your anti right slant leaves me believing you think the left has something going for it, it doesn’t. Neither does the right. Our government will take us down.
As to growth….It is about producing something of value. For decades the only big thing we can produce is houses. If housing does not come back neither will growth..And housing is not coming back.
There will be no political solutions….
Anyway your at your best when your not ranting about politics or political parties. Telling us what to prepare for is what I value most.
One last thought..Everyone should just slow down and actually listen to what Glenn beck has to say. Stop bashing him to protect your left wing ideas that don’t make any sense anyway.

And now we are going to bail out the latest example of fed-guaranteed fractional reserve banking–that upstanding insitution known as the National Bank of Afghanistan! Whoopee!
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Our currency is fast becoming worthless.
Glenn Beck may be a sanctimonious twit, but he is on to something. Morality can not be imposed from above–that’s socialism. It must come from each of us in our daily lives.
Protect yourselves. http://www.thenothingstore.com

Prayer-wheel spinners? Seems to me we’re going to need all the loving compassion we can conjure up if there’s any hope of displacing the ignorance, aversion and attachment that passes for conventional economic wisdom. Om mane padme hum. Maybe instead of either spinning or dissing the prayer wheel, it’s time to reinvent it.facebook.com/event.php?eid=146133062077368

No,folks there is no escape unless we demolish wall street and unregulated capitalism.Fine and dandy,even if we grow and eat local,rebuild American brick by brick,the leeches are waiting in the wings to steal from you,like they did with your retirement money and engineered raging inflation.Blood WILL have to flow,just make sure it’s not yours!

Labor day where labor is becoming a fond memory
What an anachronism! A special day set aside to celebrate Labor Day when labor in the US is downgraded adn over. It can’t be anything but, in this global economic paradigm. It’s a matter of economic determinism. Investment dollars were transferred to Asia where the cheapest labor gets the jobs and a strong nation state develops with a military, i.e. China.
Obama chose the Clintonistas and are trying to recreate the bubble. They should have put stipulations on the stimulus money. Only for US jobs with progressive agendas that would have at least been effective in putting people back to work. We could have passed a better health bill, as well.
In the meantime the administration is doing the most regressive thing possible. Considering extending the tax breaks to the wealthiest 1% with no way of paying for that, putting the country in even more debt with no strings attached.
I came across an article last week that exposed how the stimulus package was used by corporations. The top CEOs laid-off thousands of workers while giving themselves ever greater salaries.— And folks, these are the people that the Republicans think we should trust with everything the public sector once oversaw. Sure the government can’t do anything these days, it has been understaffed and picked away for the last 30+ years. Now the idea that govt. is incompetent has become a fait accompli!
What JHK is describing when he illlustrates Ms. Christina Romer’s confusion about why they can’t turn this ship around is the leadership’s inability to face the of failure of Neoliberal ideology a la Milton Friedman and globalism.
Starting decades ago in the Nixon administration when Friedman hypothesized that the dollar should be decoupled from gold, through the last 30+ years of deregulation=No standards, this system has been undermined by our leadership in the quest for making the dollar the fiat currency and bolstering the dominance of international banking system.
It is obvious to anyone who doesn’t have their reputation on the line, that it is impossible to have it both ways, but for the last few decades the citizenry of this country were hoodwinked into buying into the delusion.
Thus debt is the root of wealth for the few and it is a sad state of affairs that the people who followed the Pied Piper may find there is a huge price indeed for not being able to pay back their debts. The elite have created the situation where people who are in debt can’t find jobs and thus there is no way to pay back the debt. What do you think is going to happen to these people? Debt Slavery, mayhaps?
In a transcript I read this morning from Max Keiser’s site Jim Paplova interviewed (Stoneleigh) Nicole Foss about her take on the debt deflation and the way oil shortages and finance work together. Very similar to what Matt Simmons and JHK have been saying. Really worth checking out.theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2010/09/september-4-2010-jim-puplava-interviews.html

The Tea Bag movement was started by Ron Paul, but has been co-opted by Sara Palin and Glen Beck and the rest of the wannabe’s.
Ron Paul continues to offer real solutions to our specific problems and has for decades, but American voters beyond his district didn’t want to listen.
Beck and Palin’s answers might be racism, I wouldn’t know because they’re not worth listening to, anyway. Ron Paul’s answers and the movement he founded are based on the principles of the Constitution, so let’s get back to the policies that made this country great.
I would be ashamed to have voted for someone who promised nebulous benefits like “Hope” and “Change”. I’m glad it never entered my mind to do so.

A VIEW FROM 6.000 MILES AWAY
I’m really sorry guys but your once great country has been hollowed out – leaving something somewhat reminiscent of a frankenstein hologram.
The owners of Coke and Microsoft et al left your shores long ago before you heard the penny drop. Stuffing all their money from the crap they sold you whaich was made in China , India and Indonesia etc . The cash was stuffed into socks and dropped down the chimneys of those fabulous offshore tax havens whilst they sipped their martinis on the beach. All this whilst stealing the family jewels back home at the same time – quite a performance !
All this fabulous derugulated finance thanks to Ben and Alan leaving Americas middle class shaken and soon to be stirred furiously without any poured drinks being neccesary. Privatised profits and socialised losses – genius !! Even the ever dwindling tax gets kept in the Bahamas !
All this time Obama , the hollowed out ventriloquists dummy having his strings pulled by all those rich egotistical and delusional pricks who run your shadow government raping and pillaging whatever is left over of the carnage.
Not only have they completely screwed up your own country but have been able to progressively take most of the rest of the world down with you. Mind you , the job is not anywhere near finished yet. There’s still a heap to be made by Halliburton and Raytheon from the ongoing wars and there is still little pockets of cash to be stolen by the hundreds of other thieves in Washington and Wall Street.
Still millions of lives able to be taken away from their families as well The private contractors will look after that. Outsourcing – don’t you love it.
Don’t fret though , a bit of time before the total collapse happens. But don’t worry – the criminals will be well out of sight before that happens.
All that will remain will be the stench.

“The voters were expecting a champion and got a Labradoodle instead.”
Priceless.
Funny to hear Tom Friedman adopting JHK’s tone today, calling the US a “superpower in hock” doomed to decline. About time our globalist cheerleaders realized that high tech won’t get us out of this mess.

All this hubub about Glenn Beck. Who cares? It’s not like he will be our El Presedente’ any time soon. And if he ever was – at least he wouldn’t have some moron in the crowd yell “I love you Obama” so he could smile big and say “I love you too”. Awwe, see I’m not a hardened criminal out of Chicago out to steal your tax dollars for me and my cronies. I care about you. Love you. Believe in me.

I sadly now believe that Obama either does not understand the true state of our economic turmoil or he knows, but can’t risk telling the American people the truth due to the fraudections coming up in November and 2012. If he did it might go something like this, “My fellow Americans, as the President of this great nation, I am compelled to reveal the realities of change that are coming upon us. This is not something I could have imagined when I ran upon the slogan of ‘Change’ during the campaign. But, unavoidable change is coming fast and furious due to decades of misguided economic and military policies fostered by both democratic and republican leadership. You must get use to the idea that you WILL be paying higher taxes due to our crushing debt. All public programs and services, such as police protection, garbage collection, public schools, and senior programs WILL be drastically cut by 50%. Infrastructure maintenance WILL be halted until further notice. Social Security and Medicare payments will be slashed 60% because we don’t have enough working citizens contributing into the system and can’t afford to continue as is. Social programs, such as unemployment benefits, food stamps, welfare, and medicaid can no longer be funded by the government as is, and will therefore be slashed in half. The unfortunate reality is that the US government is cracking under the weight of its unsustainable obligations….

When you look at Ron Paul, one thing besides the insanity comes to mind: racism. This guy is steeped in it. Now, he may not blow the dog whistles like he used to, but the fact that as late as the mid 90s he was still whistling Dixie ought to be a wake-up call. tnr.com/article/politics/angry-white-man
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are lumpenprole entertainers. If you think these uneducated, unread, and fantasy-based bigots have a handle on reality, you’re yourself are wholly untethered.
One reason why left and right have a tug of war over Kunstler is that this crisis of industrial civilization transcends ordinary political dichotomies. Now, I feel like most of you that a shitstorm is coming. But I’d rather we keep some order in place since enduring will be hard enough as it is. I’m not sanguine about the possibilities as it is. Given the crude precriptions coming from the “heartland”, there’s a better than even chance the violence will go viral.

Let’s assume this true, I think the question that becomes important is timing? What is the timeframe of our slow disassembly?
The more I see and hear and read, the more I think this will just become our lifestyle, a slow decline rather than some quick drop.

“The White House must be a strange place these days with the management of the USA turned over to astrologasters, alchemists, prayer-wheel spinners, fakirs, viziers, necromancers and other visitors from occult realms unaffiliated with the dominion of reality.” -JHK
Unlike the crapola pushed by the “Debt” card companies, this sentence is truly priceless!
Love the tenor of this commentary; where’s Glenda the good witch and her extraordinary magiks when you need them? ;o)
Is it all really just a Kansian Dreaming?

Jim, thanks for the entertaining piece today. I differ with you on what’s going on at the highest levels of economic policy, though — and that may be decided not at the White House but at some bankster’s conclave in Switzerland.
My best guess is that Barry O is merely following the orders of the uber-banksters who have decided to drain all the reserves of our public funds directly into their coffers and let our ship of state go down. What else would explain a group of supposedly smart, highly educated people who have the time to study past Depressions, and what caused and perpetuated them, to copy the same stupid practices that have failed in the past?
Obama has been chosen as the fall-guy who will take the USA down into poverty and chaos. He and those who direct him don’t want us to clean up our act and end our dependence on debt and oil. They have another agenda — of destroying this country as a failed, but profitable, experiment — so they can move their money (and much of ours!) into more promising economies such as China’s.
How else do you explain all the boneheaded moves of bailing out those industries who gambled and lost, going deeper into can’t-win conflicts like AfPak, and racking up more debts we can never repay? Or not telling the people the truth about our predicament?
It is not just Obama at fault. This has been part of the continuing agenda to try to merge the USA into a New World Order for easier control by the puppeteers behind the scenes. Bush the First came out and said it; Clinton moved it forward, as did George the Second. Now, it’s Obama’s turn.
Politics,my friends, is out of our control. We will do better to work on our health and our wealth so we can weather this long winter that’s coming. http://www.healthyplanetdiet.com

Debt is a holographic illusion produced by the matrix wizards. It’s not reality. No one will go broke if debt disappears. The old parasitic aristocracy of free rent seekers will just have to find another trick to keep others captive. Maybe they’ll resort back to religion, given the amount of ignorance they’ve promulgated these last 50 years.

Ya know…reading this latest post by JHK, and reading the reader responses, just makes me want to go and bang my fuckin’ head against a wall! I agree with Jim…totally. Some might trivialize his comments, but he’s right on track, and we’ll see the truth of them sooner or later. This whole project (USA, etc) is just toast and the fact we can’t see or smell the smoke only proves how absolutely STUPID the average, pseudointellectuall Amerikan blog commentator is. Ignorant!!! Just simply ignorant!!! So, all the amateur economists and political theorists might just as well hang it up. You ain’t got no clue. The Grand Experiment is over, as in dead and gone. The sooner we learn to live within a new paradigm (dare I use such a fancy word?), the better off we’ll all be.

Walt, I agree that civilization is too complex and interdependent for any intervention mere humans might devise. Nobody’s proposing localization as a solution – it’s just an adaptation to the pain of contraction. The sooner we support local producers, the better their position will be when the trucks stop coming from the distribution centers.

I really enjoy Jim’s Monday essays. It’s his blog and a host of other thoughtful blogs that I use for keeping current on what is happening.
The mainstream media is a a thing of the past for me.
I suspect the blogsphere will also be gone soon.
What will then remain will be lots of good books, good articles, and hopefully wise people in the local community.
Thanks Jim. Your work means a lot to me, and many many others.

Richard Heinberg (JHK with a PhD) records the energy/economy saga with his monthly “Museletter”; Museletter 220 is current number, good synopsis of the energy panorama at hand, and to-do list for families with initiative.
Heinberg shares the wisdom of rehabbing the local railway element with JHK. Railways are defined by military strategists as “Second Dimension Surface Transport Logistics Platform”. Railroad operating mission/tenets includes stand alone and apolitical “keep ’em rolling” philosophy. Most rr lines maintain in-house repair resources, or retain local affiliated contractors giving ability to re-constitute ops in event of accident or disaster or sabotage.
America’s hundreds of short line rail operators are a valuable source of experience soon to be called on for scoping dormant rail corridor for rebuild. Super-railroads, like the Union Pacific and CSX and BNSF are already so “efficient”, they may prove unable to adapt to rail line expansion as readily as the smaller regional rail operators (ASLRRA).
In “ELECTRIC WATER” (New Society Press 2007), Christopher C. Swan presents a compendium of renewable energy and localized mobility, a scoping of elegant transport mode and land use. The government must maintain a security presence as we slide into the Oil Interregnum, probably including reformed US Army/Guard Railroad Operating & Maintenance Battalions. These rail logistics units were disbanded during the VietNam era, but are critical homeland transport and disaster recovery elements, necessary again. In present scenario, each state will have a number of railway battalions helping with crucial (agricultural) branch line rehab, handing over to private operators and moving on down the list.
Expect Federal Executive Emergency Orders for motor fuel rationing sometime mid-decade. Earlier if Iran action forces oil restrictions. Other Executive orders calling up gold and freezing all mortgage payments may come with declaration of State of Emergency. Take a deep breath, and square away your affairs, fellow Americans. Take a close look at Heinberg’s work list in “Museletter” 220.
There will be storms and earthquakes and floods as usual. Qur’an writings like Sura 9:29-30 guarantee mischief along the way. The eagle can stand only so much tweaking, and adversaries foreign & domestic will soon realize they jumped the wrong outfit. If 911DAY was met with determination, next time expect RAGE.
Wailing and gnashing of teeth ain’t gonna cut it, boys & girls… We must get to work.

We are now in the twilight zone of government funded no-fault capitalism, watching a pantomime of industrial and financial zombies trying to pass off their spastic lurchings as an economic recovery, and waiting for the made in China propane patio heaters to go on sale at Wal-Mart.

When did our black president become Irish??
More than one person has referred to him as “O’Bama.” Is there a joke I’m missing, or is this just another product of our ejumakashun system?
Relocalization isn’t an “answer” in that it would make everything “normal” again. Relocalization is just what will happen, sure as Glen Beck will weep for his lost country again. People with foresight are getting busy with the idea at their earliest convenience.
THIS is what a Saturday market might look like in every town if we had the foresight of Missoula, MT, residents.youtube.com/paulwheaton12#p/u/0/bM_Nw-V-PVA
My GOD, I’m jealous…

Walt wrote: “The problem in Kunstler’s shtick is that you don’t simply devolve a hyper-complex system called industrial civilization. There’s no guide here to such an epochal undertaking.” That’s true, and that’s what the national debate should be about: just how do we go about such an epochal undertaking, guide or no guide? JHK has made suggestions for steps in the right direction such as devaluing auto travel and putting our resources into rail. But most of our steps are still in the wrong direction. I loved your phrase “no million moron march to Mayberry,” by the way.

richinpa said:
“This is the problem with the Obama administration. They recognize that telling people the truth, that we have to simplify and live more reasonable lives (like say goodbye to the 10 mpg super SUV) is not going to get them reelected so they end up saying what people want to hear.”
Rich, your premise seems to be that Obama knows the truth but knows it is politically toxic to tell the truth.
In sincerely doubt he has a clue.
I mean, he, like the rest of the establishment, puts its faith in economists who believe that prosperity comes from printing money, handing it out to people, and telling them, here’s some cash, go out and consume more.

nickelthrower:
As an ex-resident of California, I sympathize with what you are going through.
Not that the rest of the country isn’t liable to collapse just as completely as California, but due to its incredibly incompetent and corrupt elected officials, it is liable to crash before most of the states and we will be able to rubberneck and see California become a 50-car pileup and essentially “watch the movie” about what is going to happen to us shortly thereafter.
I guess it is sort of a wicked irony that Californians, in the home of the motion picture industry, will be the ones that have to live the movie without ever getting to watch it first.

All the theories of the left and all the theories of the right are irrelevant. What supports us is the natural world of plants, trees, lakes, streams, rivers and oceans. And they are dying. How many thousands of hormone mimicking chemicals are in our water? Even if in trace amounts these are enormously toxic to the body. How many bacteria and how much fecal matter are in our meats? How much heavy metals are in the fish? We have bent mother nature over a barrel and fucked her dry and hard. It has been a global rape. She will humble us in the end. I’ve read that some 40% of the phytoplankton is gone from the oceans. hello? Peak oil is irrelevant if the bottom of the food chain dies back. The webs of life that connect us to the world and each other are breaking.
It is not just Americans who lack the humility and compassion to live simply. The Chinese and Brazilians are on their own missions to destroy what’s left of the their natural heritage. It is hard to believe that we will get through this with anything like the numbers of people who are currently alive. I have children and I fear for their future. Cheese doodles and TV, Palin and Beck, they are all distractions from the real story. Those who have billions of dollars will find themselves with nothing but pixels and paper.Even as they win every round they will lose like everyone else.
And hey, enjoy this beautiful day. 75 with a gentle breeze here in Maine, I’m heading to the store to buy groceries with my credit card.
blessings to you all,
cy

Great post…And i agree mostly about peak debt vs peak oil.
Obama can’t admit to or deal with the debt, because his bosses own the TBTF banks (& the Fed) that hold most of it. These insolvent banks need to be liquidated and replaced with an honest system. How does that happen, when they are in control of the government, the parties, the media, the markets, and the major corporations??
Further efforts to transfer more of the debt to taxpayers are likely. (very stimulating no!) No doubt they would like the “storm” to continue until most the debt is transferred. Since there is allready an oversupply of Govt debt, pressure is building for a flight from treasuries, and perhaps, from the dollar.
Meanwhile, we are near peak oil, if available figures are valid. The debt crisis holds down oil development, production and demand. If the debt problem is solved somehow, rising oil demand will reveal the truth of peak oil shortly thereafter; if not, then it is delayed awhile.
My guess: Only further demand destroying disasters will keep peak oil from general awareness for more than another year. Wonder what they have planned??

“The government could and by could I mean they have the right to, issue greenbacks instead of relying on the Fed’s debt backed dollars. But O’bama knows he can’t do that and expect to be a viable candidate next time around. The banks and corporations have taken over the government.”
I agree. In fact, Kennedy issued an order to start printing United States Notes in lieu of Federal Reserve Notes awhile before his trip to Dallas. Subsequent presidents have been leery of doing the same. Wonder why!

While I agree with Jim on many many many things….the “prayer-wheel spinners” line is a odd one. Buddhists…if that is what he was getting at, are some of the most simple living and realistic people out there…..I’ll leave it at that.

Here’s the long range weather and climate report and how it WILL affect your future and your survival plans. Everything that FedUp writes will come to pass within 10 to 30 years. This year anyone can tell that the climate is different in many diverse locations. The old climate is NOT coming back. Or if it does, not for long.
(Actually,I awakened 20 years ago with upper level geography, climatology, bio-geography and meteorology courses.)climateprogress.org/2010/09/03/energy-and-global-warming-news-for-september-3rd-amazon-at-lowest-lev…
FedUpWithDenial says:
September 5, 2010 at 5:47 am
“We are living in the epoch that Wallace Broecker twenty years ago called “the CO2 super-interglacial,” otherwise known as the Anthropocene. Yet the public as a whole is still largely brain-dead on the subject, living in the Dark Ages. Catman306 and dyuane (comments #23 and 24), like most ClimateProgress readers, have awakened to the contemporary reality. (Actually,I awakened 20 years ago with upper level geography, climatology, bio-geography and meteorology courses.) Everett Smith (comment #13) obviously hasn’t:
“No permanent drought on the amazon [sic]. Peru had flooding several months ago.”
In other words, nothing is really happening. Despite “climate alarmism,” today’s droughts, floods, storms, etc. are just business as usual. But let’s take a deeper look. Drought and flood, associated respectively with unusually strong atmospheric High- and Low-pressure regimes, are the extremes of the planetary hydrological cycle. Global warming intensifies these extremes, making the Highs higher and the Lows lower; droughts become more severe and protracted, while storm-related flooding and other effects become worse. Globally, total precipitation increases, since warming oceans mean more evaporation (clue: warmer air holds more moisture), but much of that extra moisture has a long atmospheric lifetime as uncondensed steam, which allows sunlight in but traps infrared heat, opposing cloud formation and favoring persistent drought. Everywhere except in the driest deserts, where Highs are perpetual, one extreme tends to follow the other in an irregular cycle.
There are latitudinal differences in how these effects play out. Normally wet tropical areas such as the rainforests of South America and Southeast Asia, whose climate is heavily influenced by the phases of the Pacific Ocean ENSO cycle, are seeing much more extreme inter-annual wet-dry fluctuations under global warming, with the drying tendency being especially worrisome since the combination of heat and drought reduces river flows, kills trees, makes forests wildfire-prone, adds net CO2 to the atmosphere, and promotes desertification. The survivability of the world’s tropical forests under global warming is very much in doubt.
Simultaneously, the normally dry subtropics are shifting poleward and becoming even hotter and drier, tending to make these areas less habitable in the future, if habitable at all—the definition of “Hell.”
The formerly temperate mid-latitudes, by contrast, are seeing both Hell AND High Water—predominantly hot, dry conditions in some years; in others, huge rainfall excesses, most of that delivered in five or six extreme “events.” An unwelcome tendency in this direction has been apparent for some time, suggesting that in the future many mid-latitude areas will experience an annual cycle comprised of a long dry season alternating with a brief wet season or two which might or might not be wet, and might be too wet. Sorry.
Thus, look for future droughts, however severe, to reverse themselves eventually—but with a bang. The name for the bang is “tropical weather,” which under global warming might happen at almost any time of year even in the mid-latitudes. The bottom won’t just fall out; it won’t stop falling out. It will be like the legendary Biblical Flood. If you aren’t completely washed away and drowned, you’ll feel like old Noah, wondering where the latest drought went. But don’t worry—it’ll be back, probably worse than before.
Today’s worst droughts provide nothing more than a faint foretaste of future ones. In those, crops will wither, the earth will literally turn brown and die, wildfires will rage, and the soil will crack and turn to windblown dust. Then inundating rains will erode the earth and wash away whatever remains. That, through cycle after cycle of ruinous destruction, is our likely future under unmitigated global warming.
Food? If you’re one of the unlucky survivors, you’ll subsist on a sparse diet of primarily wild grasses, weeds, snails, rats, and roaches, eaten raw and whole when you can get them. You’ll have to harvest and/or catch them yourself, of course. Sorry.”
You are NOT going to be able to live off the land. Neither will very much wildlife. Nor will very much plant life. Long droughts followed by floods will not result in sustainable agriculture or much for any creature to eat. Think about what a Pakistan size flood will do to your local river valley. And follow that with a two year drought. After 4 or 5 cycles you’ll be living in a desert.

Hey Jim I but you will love this.msnbc.msn.com/id/39023909/ns/politics-white_house/
Yes I voted for Obama thinking change was coming. From now on though no more voting for me. The best thing we can is just ignore the elites and try to come up with a new future of our own.

Recently I wrote a piece for a friend’s local blog that I called “Declining Fortunes”. It had similarities to JHK’s own wanderings around his home area where he has travelled roads long familiar to him and then commented on the downward slide he has seen happening.
I didn’t see it as a dark and foreboding article, it was just the facts as I saw them. Nothing spectacular, I wasn’t predicting the end of civilization in the next 6 months or anything remotely like that.
But the first commenter to my post went crazy, promising never to read another word I wrote because in his opinion it was all doom and gloom and it depressed him. Poor guy, he’s a local real estate agent, and despite the signs all around him, he apparently had not grasped the reality of our situation and did not appreciate seeing it in print, even by a nobody on a small local blog. Guessing I gave him nightmares, poor thing.
It didn’t generate a lot of comments, and while one poster agreed with me, most of the comments lamented my lack of optimism and told me it’s still a wonderful world if I would only get out and smell the beautiful flowers more often.
So I’m learning, slowly, that the truth is just not on most peoples’ agendas. And if you dare to speak it, you will be villified and/or pitied. But not listened to; never that.
I guess it’s better to fall into the abyss totally suprised and unprepared. Magic only works if you are innocent, and magic is the only thing that will save them now.

I guess I feel like Grouchy Old Girl as I have been both vilified and pitied for telling the truth. My background is fundamentalism and most of the people from my background remain there.
It’s sad, but it’s probably just human nature, and always has been.
Precious few really want to know the truth.

The collective and individual debts of the US Treasury and American citizens are worth about as much as my brothers box of plastic poker chips unless they are backed with the ability to produce products and services that we can trade for other products and services of value.
OF VALUE.
Trading for more plastic poker chips may prolong the game but it doesn’t produce the coffee, milk, bacon and eggs for breakfast in the morning.
I’m reading this while watching Obama talk on “The View” on television. He’s the most intelligent and charming US President we’ve had in three decades but he is fundamentally convinced that Federal Reserve Notes have value. He got where he is by jumping through all the hoops in proper order; to refuse a jump now would be extremely out of character.
We’re fucked.

Just about everybody writing in to this blog thinks we should “do something”. JHK is the head cheerleader and each time he chants, the stands erupt in taunting, accusations, insult-throwing, etc. Ol’ Jim must be confused!
Did it ever occur to any of us that maybe the sleepwalkers have it over us?
Sure, it’s important to be prepared but outside of some stored food and kerosene, matches and a garden, what can the average person really do?
Adapt.
That’s right; adapt. Work it out as it happens. Deal with the consequences of your actions or inactions as it comes. Be angry, remorseful, violent, etc as you need to be. And then you’ll get along with your life. That’s what the average person will do.
And why not? For all the left/right, conservative/liberal, Obama/anti-Obama rhetoric on this site, one thing is for sure: it ain’t gonna play out as you expect! It’s going to do what it wants and it will be a surprise to all of us how things turn out. You’re gonna see more shit come out of left field…..
Now, for all that, I’m the most prepared guy I know. But what DO I know? I may be wrong. No doubt at some point in the future, I’ll be learning something valuable from someone who at this moment is woefully unprepared.
Jeez, sometimes I think you folks are all well-armed with machine guns and are firing wildly into the night. Reality is hunkered down, maybe catching a little shuteye. And certainly not paying any attention to us.

You still don’t get it, do you? The elitists are looking forward to the end of civilization. They really don’t fucking care as long as they have theirs. In fact, they appear to enjoy it all the more if someone else is suffering and degraded. Obama not just their puppet, he is one of them, or appears to be, or wants to be. “Let them eat cake.”

Stupidity is rampant in this country. We’ve cored out our economy and it’s now substituted with serving one another beers or developing idiotic “apps” and games. Some bonehead at a recent tech wingding said, “I want to put a game layer over day to day SW programs.”. So he means that when you log onto your banking website you can click on your savings account and watch demons and dragons dance around. Wonderful.
I worked for a Fortune 500 health care company that has recently gone through some very public recalls. You know who. I was let go in a downsizing recently as the truckloads of cash they make weren’t enough. They are doing a “internal review” of why they are having quality problems. As someone who witnessed this it was two words: Cost Cutting. No regards to effects on R+D, quality etc. So they will spend weeks in meetings, doing nothing, trying to escape blame and nothing positive will come from it. Maybe a “reorg” or two. Shuffle the deck.
We are quickly becoming a nation of self deluded idiots. At ALL levels. Dog help us all!

It seems to me that the probability of a compressive deflacionary contraction becomes larger with every passing day. Item: quantitative easing has gone one to the tune of trillions of dollars and nothing happens (not even inflation). Item: there’s persistent high unemployment with no end in sight as companies refuse to hire. Item: our trade deficit is once again going through the roof indicating that manufacturing activity that left this country remains gone and that re-industrialization, if ever a possibility, hasn’t even taken off the ground. Item: whatever jobs are left are lower paying, part-time jobs that are no substitute for the tax base destroyed by the recession (depression?). So how is it our country intends to pay for its long-term promises domestic and foreign, let alone serve as policeman for the rest of the globe? Even our perennial uber-optimist, Tom Friedman of the NYT, wrote an op-ed piece titled “Superbroke, Superfrugal, Superpower?” It is altogether apparent that this time things might be fundamentally different and that this ride will be unlike any before in the story of the country. And yes, I do agree that SOME people are resilient and will come out the other side poorer but freer; those not disposed in that manner either physically or mentally are in for the scariest of rides.

jimmie sez:
” Everything we do to add additional layers of complexity to these already tottering systems will guarantee an eventual orgy of blood and material destruction to this land. ”
And yet you voted for our lead MORON…Mr. Obama. He was going to give us more of everything, hope, change, healthcare, stimulus, government jobs, government motors…Give, give, give, with all the attendant complexity, bloat and corruption. He had all the programs and ideas and things in the world to give us…save one. The means to pay for all his crap.
You are a moron, Mr. Cuntsler. You pine for less yet vote for the party and the candidates of more. You are an enigma inside a riddle wrapped in a diaper. And its likely that your smelly load is no more likely to be changed than your senile mind.

RichInPA sez:
“They recognize that telling people the truth, that we have to simplify and live more reasonable lives (like say goodbye to the 10 mpg super SUV) is not going to get them reelected…”
No one had to tell people they needed to “say goodbye to the 10
mpg super SUV” the price of gas was convincing enough. People are not a stupid as many on this site imagine them to be. Control of the “stupid populace” is the justification that the dimotwatts have used to tried to rule over the little people. Fuck these pompous assholes.

emaho sez:
“This whole project (USA, etc) is just toast and the fact we can’t see or smell the smoke only proves how absolutely STUPID the average, pseudointellectuall Amerikan blog commentator is. Ignorant!!! Just simply ignorant!!! So, all the amateur economists and political theorists might just as well hang it up. You ain’t got no clue.”
But you being a professional economist and political theorist do have a clue? Uh huh….riiiiight.

Pangolin sez:
“I’m reading this while watching Obama talk on “The View” on television. He’s the most intelligent and charming US President we’ve had in three decades but he is fundamentally convinced that Federal Reserve Notes have value…”
He goes on “The View” and you are ready to attribute him as being intelligent. Sure. He’s a fucking genius.

OEO said: “Guaran-fucking-tee you that Beck has read more fucking books in the last year than you have in the last five.”
OEO, here is a Glenn Beck recommended book list:glennbeckbooks.qarf.com/
JHK’s WMBH is on this Glenn Beck reading list.

Look, mouthbreather, books by Cleon Skousen and Gerald LK Smith tend to ideological confirm the racist fucktwaddle of assholes like yourself. No doubt, you consider yourself an exemplar of some advanced civilization. That’s fine. Americanism wouldn’t be ugly without the likes of your tribe.

what? something wrong with growth? OMFG
Trying to get people to understand this is like expecting them to know the Federal Reserve is composed of both private and public entities. It is like expecting them to know the meaning of ‘oligarchy’
Not cold enough yet for such things.
Nachos anyone?

In theory The Great Recession is history, but for those of us who live and work on Real Street the carnage and horror continues. On Real Street, outside the gated communities where 1% of the people own 90% of everything, we are now at 99 weeks and counting.
The insurance we purchased over years of dutiful employment has run out. We will be living on the street soon, it’s just a matter of time.
Police evict MA couple evicted despite protest. September 2008. by Boston Globe (David L. Ryan/Globe Staff)
If you’re a small business on Real Street, a business run by a real person that employs less than 25 real workers, that relies on real people to purchase real goods and real services, the economy looks like a desert of foreclosure and unemployment. We search the horizon from our shop windows and trade vans thirsty for customers. They’re out there, but they’re penny less and some are bleeding a real sadness that will be diagnosed as depression.
And, what has our government done to get us back to work? Nothing. The Congress has done nothing. The White House has done nothing. The Chamber of Commerce has done nothing. The Democratic, Republican, Green, Liberal, Socialist, Tea parties have done nothing.
The economists and the stock market have been cheering for months that our troubles are behind us. They say there will be no second economic crash. But, out here on Real Street the Gross Domestic Product is nothing more than a mantra economists chant while they contemplate in their dirty navels.
Week after week, Paul Krugman of the New York Times argues economic semantics with the likes of the Wall Street Journal as the main stream media throws gasoline on the fighters to fire up the political polarization. Cut the crap. None of it matters. We’re dying from a thousand cuts of being nickle and dimed.
President Obama says there is very little the government can do to create jobs. I wretch and my eyes bulge each time I hear our most promising leader in decades spew such a lie. The government makes the rules. The current rules aren’t working or were never enforced. Take the bull by the horns you shameless flak for Wall Street and do something: Put the American people back to work now!
Small businesses are running on cash flow fumes. High unemployment, less and less discretionary income, fewer and fewer middle class families means less customers spending less and less and less. Add them up: a few million 1099 workers without benefits here, tens of millions of part-time and freelance workers there, millions more struggling to pay the rent, before you know it you’re talking real unemployment and peonage.
We can’t do anything to create jobs? Really!?
Bangalore call center. Outsourcing Jobs to India. by Picture from TIME Inc.
One: End the H1B Visa and All Tax Incentives for Offshore Jobbing
The H1B is nothing more than a license to put American workers on the unemployment line. There are plenty of people right here in America right now that can do anything a person from any other county can do.
The only Americans that benefit from the H1B, other than CorpPersons, are the lawyers toiling day after day to craft absurd job specifications allowing companies to not employ Americans and import cheaper workers. None of that was the intent of the H1B in theory, but on Real Street that is exactly how this nonsensical device is used.
Who doesn’t believe Americans can do any job here? Where in the world are there better workers? That we are failures and have fallen behind is a myth. We are the hardest working people in the world, you know it, I know it, the corporations know it and the government knows it. American workers are a real value, until you have to pay them what they’re worth and a living wage necessary to live in America.
Requiring Hindi language skills to work in America to better work with a foreigner who has taken your job is circular logic any software spreadsheet would not let you get away with.
President Obama promised to end the tax breaks that are sending jobs offshore. I suggest he do more. Tax offshore labor the way you tax all of us here. Why do they get to work in another country and ship their labor here tax free? I’d like to say I’m phoning it in from Bangalore and, therefore, I’m not subject federal and state payroll, sales and use taxes on my services.
Educated, skilled, professional, eager to work Americans are on the sidelines now, benched without hope of getting back in the game. They are losing their skills to foreigners because Big Greed corporations will not let them train on the job, which is how any new and now necessary skills are learned.
Shame on you Mr. President. Shame on every elected member of Congress for allowing the H1B and its flagrant abuse continue. End it!
And, one last word on this to all the conservative economists and anyone else who spouts the lie that globalization is unstoppable and always good: Don’t dare call me a protectionist. Until the playing fields are level from country to country globalization is just a ruse to enrich the pockets of Wall Street and the monied elite.
Finally, just to make sure that every able bodied man and woman in America that wants to work has a job, Mr. President, you should temporarily rescind all international trade agreements until this crisis is over, the crisis on Real Street that is.
Two: Enforce a Home Foreclosure Moratorium
At the beginning of the Great Recession banks took over homes and put them on the market. Then, they began warehousing foreclosed homes with chip board and spray paint. Now, they’re ignoring mortgage delinquencies so as not to draw attention to their insolvency. In doing so, Big Banking recast neighborhoods into blighted slums and made the unemployed and under-employed into the indefinitely non-employable homeless.
These actions are despicable anytime, but particularly in a time of crisis manufactured from the greed and fraud of the same banks that are now tossing American families into the street.
The Obama Administration’s, voluntary for the mortgage industry, Making Homes Affordable program is a farce. It is doing little to nothing to end the inhumane practice of making American’s homeless. You not allowed to do this to a dog, but the banks can do it to American families.
I am certain a sane, practical and fair moratorium on home foreclosure for those who have lost their ability to temporarily pay the rent, due to no fault of their own, can be crafted.
Foreclosures, at this point in a worldwide financial crisis, are destroying people, families and the property that the banks claim is so valuable. Leave a house empty, watch it fall.
Mr. President, members of Congress, how can you watch this happen on your watch! How? Americans without enough work are spending sleepless nights, convulsing in hopelessness. You should be doing the same until you end this atrocity.
With a foreclosure moratorium in effect, out of work Americans can at least continue to spend what money they have on life’s other necessities and have a address from which to search for employment. It will help break the downward economic spiral of both the housing crash and cash crunch. It’s an instant unemployment benefit in the form of temporary rent relief. If time is money, and it is, all this costs us is the time it will take. Time allowing unemployed Americans a place to sleep that would otherwise be empty and deteriorating. Cash that will immediately be spent and, therefore, create customers and demand that will spur employment growth in the private sector.
Windmills in Copenhagen. by Common Alternative Energy Sources.
Three: Renewable Energy Investment
Oil is the problem. Renewable energy, made in America, is the answer. Renewable energy is the Erie Canal, the locomotive, the railroad, the little engine and the fuel that could and can drive our economy out of this crisis.
Don’t call it stimulus. That will just get the know-nothing economists fighting with each other. It’s an investment and it must be made now.
Start with enough money to put a new roof and solar energy system on every home in American. Grant every homeowner up to $40,000 in the form of a no interest loan with a payment equal to the loan amount divided by 360 months. These loans should be attached to the home’s deed and pass on to the next owner until the grant is paid in full.
Necessary roofing a huge, quick boost in construction employment. by This Old House – PBS.
Next, I want to see windmills. They are the most beautiful things in the world and I want to see them everywhere. I live at the Jersey Shore and I would love nothing more than to see windmills to the horizon and beyond as I peruse the Atlantic Ocean.
They say we may break-even on the Wall Street (extortion) bailout called the Troubled Asset Repurchase Program (TARP). Big deal. What was the estimated possible downside cost of the banks plunging 90% of us into turmoil? I’ll remind you, $700 billion. That ought to be enough.
Let’s INVEST $700 billion over ten years on renewable energy. Earmark all of it for American companies and American labor. You off shore anything, you’re out. Better set up a separate company to do this and we will be looking at the books, records and up your ass to see if you’re hiding a H1B.
Don’t tell me we can’t spend it all in America. We can. (See Number Two).
Break-even? Ha! America will be ready for anything. America will be so green the sky might fall. The return on investment will be in multiples of hundreds, just like the old Erie Canal which, by the way, was called Governor Clinton’s Folly. It proved to be one of the best investments New York State ever made.http://www.UseCashMovement.com

Well I too voted for Obama, but a good friend warned me not to expect too much, that Obama would get co-opted by the systemic processes and prove ineffectual. The friend was right. There was a brief window of opportunity when Republicans were supine in early 2009 when he could have charged in to “spend his political capital” and “respond to his mandate”. He could have ordered the immediate shutdown of the stupid wars and pulled troops out of Japan&Germany. He could have picked a serious AG and started investigations and prosecutions of banker/grifter/criminals. The troops would have been home and his act of “treason” already forgotten by a grateful public who wanted it to happen but just needed someone to tell them they did. The ongoing series of prosecutions would have the public focused on who’s really to blame. Yes, we’d still have a depression; that is written in the stars, but maybe more of us would know why. Refusal to back up inflated real estate prices would have resulted in huge bank losses and bankruptcies (as it should have), but the public would be the beneficiary of housing prices restored to mid-nineties levels (which is their real level anyway). But no, he proved timid and naive enough to think he could temporize and work collaboratively with the other side…bad move.
Of course it’s now too late for him to change and become assertive; the opposition has taken his measure and they know he’s scared of them and has feet of clay. So now, absent his 9/11 event, he is condemned to be an increasingly irrelevant place-holder, scorned and ridiculed until he is cast off in 2012 in favor of the maniac du jour..
I knew this would happen and hoped McCain would have won, so he could take the blame. Maybe the forces at work are too much and I am wrong in thinking Obama really had a choice.

I see Obama has just announced $50 billion to be spent on “roads, railways and runways”. The railways part sounds okay, but just what does he think is going to be using the roads and runways for much longer?

Perhaps what is becoming increasingly scary about the current social-political landscape is the apparent divergence of political will and common sense.
No truer example of this looking-glass-disparity was seen by a few who bothered to tune into the “its all good” in Iraq speech offered a while back.
I would seem that would have bee a good time to admit what a terrible turn of events have transpired as a result of government acting in almost as a rogue power, ignoring every warning, every obvious negative associated with its actions.
Now, we seem to have these preposterous notions touted almost daily if not weekly, and the absurd has become the inane.

Wally sez:
“Look, mouthbreather, books by Cleon Skousen and Gerald LK Smith tend to ideological confirm the racist fucktwaddle of assholes like yourself.”
You know nothing about me. Absolutely nothing. Yet I am a racist? By what words have I denigrated a race, any race? And I am the mouthbreather? I know for a fact you must be a mouthbreather for your nose is clearly buried up the rectum of your leftist puppetmasters.

WOW the economy must be very bad because MSNBC actually broke into its marathon of “Lock Up” to show our president preaching at a Union Rally. Moreover, like the job description calls for, the president kicked off his mid-term campaign…and God bless him for doing it in a dumb down everyman tone. We are so screwed!

“Damn seems like just yesterday everybody was saying he was going to be the next Lincoln.”
Not really. Slightly over 50% voted for him. Lincolnian attribitions? Maybe 5%. For those seeing farther than the tip of their nose they saw him for what he was and is…all hat, no cattle. The electorate purchased a pig in a poke. The bag has been opened.

It must be the case that President Obama and the other denizens of high places do not have a clue what I might mean by all this — though I am hardly the only one advancing this set of ideas

My sniffer has led me to the same conclusion for quite a while now. Localization, social decomplexification, oil depletion, climate change, overpopulation, and general resource depletion as a political stance is not understood or at the least not recognized by this administration.
A new political position based on understanding that we have reached the limits of growth is shared by loyal readers of this blog. There must be at least 100,000 of us by now. We and those like us are not even a blip on the radar of Mr photo Op.
IMHO

“A new political position based on understanding that we have reached the limits of growth…”
That would be called the Tea Party movement and it is much larger than 100,000. The limits of growth include the growth of government. That is what is so laughable about JHK’s condemnation and dismissal of the movement. They are in agreement with much of which he espouses yet he tries to reduce them to cornpone Nazis. Guess he’s jealous because they didn’t ask him to speak at any of their little gatherings. Seig Heil Jimmy.

WTF tea party?
Tzatza you whacked or what? Those people are about return to prosperity, growth and rule by the established order. They have no brains. Those corn pone Nazis have nothing in common with the ideals I expose. They are the tattered remnants of sheep from the republican party who have no Shepard.
Being happier with less being on the top of the list.
I thought I was finished with comments for the week but I cant let a connection to the tea party (whatever it is) go unchallenged and refuted.

Jesus H. Christ, we’ve got a Glenn Beck lover — known as “tzatza” — infiltrating CFN.
Is he seriously going to waste our time defending a manipulative TV Mormon moron looking to buy his corporate masters a little more time to loot the US by getting the masses to focus on the evil “gubmint” and “Muslim Obama”?
If you want to know what Beck and the Tea Party is about, watch this brief rant:youtube.com/watch?v=yNTMc6XXUvM
Perhaps Beck is winning over Red Staters in an attempt to show them that magic-underwear-wearing Mormons are not so scary — thus ushering in Mitt Romney in 2012, who will finish the transformation of America into a Third World country.

Because America is so tapped out, the only way the elites can get richer is by making everybody poorer. It’s all relative.
If you think Lloyd Blankfein is powerful now, just imagine how powerful he’ll be in a Third World America.
The Big Banker Boyz need your Social Security to pay for next year’s Christmas bonuses, America. After that, they’ll push for inflation.

The top 10% of our country have gotten burned by this depression as well. The result for them is akin to falling off a bicycle and getting a badly scraped knee. For the rest of us, the past few years have been like a twenty car pile up, with heads severed, limbs missing, and blood soaked interstates. And that’s going to be nothing like the preview of coming attractions in a theatre near you! What you’ll see in the next few years, and it’s happening already, is the rich kids gathering up what’s left of their toys and high tailing it to their private, deluxe compounds and bunkers in Bermuda, St. Kitts, and a few other assorted, choice private islands. By then, Jim’s favorite place to bash, the Hamptons, will look like a garage sale in Hoboken. It ain’t gonna be pretty, and a lot of boys on the street are gonna have an arsenal a whole lot bigger than the ones you have and mistakenly believe will save your pathetic, sorry ass.

The following are the core values by one Tea Party group calling themselves the Tea Party Patriots:
“Fiscal Responsibility: Fiscal Responsibility by government honors and respects the freedom of the individual to spend the money that is the fruit of their own labor. A constitutionally limited government, designed to protect the blessings of liberty, must be fiscally responsible or it must subject its citizenry to high levels of taxation that unjustly restrict the liberty our Constitution was designed to protect. Such runaway deficit spending as we now see in Washington D.C. compels us to take action as the increasing national debt is a grave threat to our national sovereignty and the personal and economic liberty of future generations.
Constitutionally Limited Government: We, the members of The Tea Party Patriots, are inspired by our founding documents and regard the Constitution of the United States to be the supreme law of the land. We believe that it is possible to know the original intent of the government our founders set forth, and stand in support of that intent. Like the founders, we support states’ rights for those powers not expressly stated in the Constitution. As the government is of the people, by the people and for the people, in all other matters we support the personal liberty of the individual, within the rule of law.
Free Markets: A free market is the economic consequence of personal liberty. The founders believed that personal and economic freedom were indivisible, as do we. Our current government’s interference distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty. Therefore, we support a return to the free market principles on which this nation was founded and oppose government intervention into the operations of private business.”
What part of these core values do you disagree with?
And finally, they ain’t looking for a shepherd. They have resisted putting forth candidates or embracing a grand poohbah.. They instead have wisely recognized that a third party is a prescription for disaster. They instead are wiling to get behind existing candidates from either party who embrace their core values.
There is nothing either Nazi or corn pone about their values. That is merely a label thrown at them in a silly attempt to get the uninformed among us to negate their legitimacy. Kind of like yelling “racist” every five minutes on MSNBC to dismiss those who don’t buy the “unbiased” views of those in ascendancy on that particular channel. A sophomoric non-debating technique that is both childish and effective for the non-thinking libtard set.

Barack Obama climbed to the political pinnacle by carefully avoiding anything that resembled leadership or independent thinking. If the ruling class had ever detected anything resembling a backbone in this “triangulator” in the image and likeness of Bill Clinton, they never would have allowed him to pretend to be in charge.
But he was willing, no eager, to disown and renounce truth-tellers like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and surround himself with calculating political hacks like David Axelrod and Rahm Emmanuel who pass down his marching orders from Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon.
The collapsing capitalist US economy will soon be in need of a scapegoat. If Barack Obama doesn’t get lucky and the Generals and Bankers don’t call for war on Iran, he’s going to be it! Obama will not make it to 2012 as President. I hold no ill will towards him as a man and he has a beautiful family and those two innocent little girls, so I hope his penalty will not be imprisonment or worse. But that’s a decision his masters will make.

“The Big Banker Boyz need your Social Security…”
Cows,
There isn’t any Social Security. The Big Government Boyz took it and pissed it down an oxidized drain a long, long time ago. It was a pyramid scheme from the get go. Come on man, you must know that?

Dude, Glenn Beck is reads books the same way you read bumper stickers. You think you’re intellectually curious? Yet you trust a guy whose idea of discourse is a chalkboard, hysterical oversimplifications, and books by idiots like Skousen? That’s the kind of crap Beck reads. Has he read Hume, Locke, Mill, Burke? Has he delved into Spengler, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Vico? Do you even know whose those figures are?
I doubt it. Now go back to your all-white fantasy world.

“The collapsing capitalist US economy will soon be in need of a scapegoat. If Barack Obama doesn’t get lucky and the Generals and Bankers don’t call for war on Iran, he’s going to be it! Obama will not make it to 2012 as President. I hold no ill will towards him as a man…”
Come on Malcolm, try and use your brain. You are describing the collapsing of the US economy but hold no ill will towards Obama. I’m assuming you feel the collapsing of the economy is a bad thing. If so Obama has contributed to the collapse but adding trillions of dollars of debt by massive new programs, bailouts and stimulus spending. Yet you hold no “ill will towards him”? Now how the fuck is that possible?

“Dude, Glenn Beck is reads books the same way you read bumper stickers.”
Hey Wally, You are a FUCKTARD. You said Beck is unread. When you are proven to be a jackass and a liar (as Beck is known for being quite well read) you now want to change the subject to “Beck Doesn’t Read the Right Kind of Books.”
Another stunning liberal example of “lose the argument, change the subject.” Nice try, ASSHOLE.

You said:
Free Markets: A free market is the economic consequence of personal liberty. The founders believed that personal and economic freedom were indivisible, as do we. Our current government’s interference distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty. Therefore, we support a return to the free market principles on which this nation was founded and oppose government intervention into the operations of private business.”
So you probably think ole Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin would have been big fans of Wal-Mart?
And another thing…
Social Security has a surplus in theory, but the fund is indeed probably full of government IOUS, but that has something to do with SS being insolvent or a bad program. Our leaders just decided to use the fund to fight wars and give tax breaks to the rich.

*Bad debt will eventually cripple the global oil industry’s ability to perform, and the failures of the oil industry will only amplify the killing force of debt. It’s that simple.*
Absolutely beautifully succinctly put Jim…. but nope they’re not listening….or maybe they are? And maybe they know too now that the odds of maintaining long-term, economic balance, a civil society, legitimate law and order are just too horribly stacked against them?
The option for a neat orderly queue by the steerage and lower-middle classes to the lifeboats a ridiculous pipe-dream….
Why else all the blatant in-action?
Your prediction Mr. Kunstler for Palin to be serious uber-yankee-doodle-leader, is truly frightening… here a snippet of her grip on the oil markets, and having been a Governor of Alaska…you might imagine she’d have a head-start with that….
“Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not… So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here.”
Maybe I should start taking conspiracy theories a tad more seriously?…. And for sure we have the nails of a constant fear of terrorism constantly hammered into us…either side of the Atlantic.
And from a neat, easy, clean executable strategy point of view…. why try and turn the Titanic around when its course is so clearly and obstinately set…..
Nope…scupper the bugger!
Surely smart thinking says you sacrifice the majority for the greater good of the minority elite and reset the clock….
(And that clock has been ticking now for an awful long time)
I’m in America right here, right now as it happens, Scottsdale AZ to be precise. And what do I find…..?
Well in many respects a Disneyesque fantasy AC dependent paradise, sitting mirage like here squat in the middle of the desert.
Nobody walks, (no really not at all)..unless from monster SUV to the sidewalk. At the local fuel pumps Diesel is a non deliverable option for automobiles…so the good ole neighbourhood tattoo’s and piercing boyz here need super-refined gas to just step outta the door.
And everything in the hotel I’m in is disposable. No porcelain, glass or steel to eat or drink with….all is plastic baby spoon and styrofoam…
Recycling as a working concept hasn’t even got off base?
I think Jim’s been bang-on right with our future for years now; a combination of natural and man-made calamity is a coming. How will the locals react?
Well on the 28th August as my BA 747’s finally lumbered into Phoenix a thunderstorm had set down a deluge and hour or so beforehand…. the result? Multiple highway pile-ups….one involving more than 65 vehicles!!
Yep… when you’re on cruise control and a-sleepin-at-the-wheel….you’re for sure gonna hit that wall… and the headlights will go permanently off.
Are we all go with that?

I’d love to hear what Dmitry Orlov has to say about Obama’s recent pronouncements on the American economy, our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growing hordes of economic losers here at home who are just looking for a convenient scapegoat to blame for their mounting problems. Maybe we can flouridate the nation’s drinking water with copious amounts of anti-depressants and flood tv screens with reruns of “I Love Lucy” and “Leave It To Beaver”? That’s better than doing nothing.

The big “O” has to say that because there is a teensy, tiny portion of sheeple who still believe our happy motoring lifestyle will continue-along with the well paid construction jobs to go with it. In my area, the only major construction going on is the county jail-freaking 8 sparkling stories of incarceration. And we’re going to need it. When you think of it, what else is Obama going to say to Joe Sixpack on Labor Day? As Americans continue to go through the motions, fantasizing about acquiring new, 5 bedroom, 4 1/2 bath Mcmansions, and the oh-so-cool his and her SUVs to match, we are getting good at pretending the big, fat, veined dildo pounding us isn’t making our hemroids flare up even worse.

“You said:”
No. I didn’t say that. I was quoting the core values of The Tea Party Patriots
“So you probably think ole Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin would have been big fans of Wal-Mart?”
Do I think they would have shopped there? I have no idea. But I am guessing that they would have felt that anyone wishing to shop there should go ahead and do so.
“Social Security has a surplus in theory…” What the hell good is a surplus in theory?
S.S. was begun when, on average, people died before they would ever have a chance to receive any money. It was a joke and a sham from the very beginning. Take all you have ever contributed into the system. Had you personally put that money aside and invested in a mere bank account you’d have something to show for your labors. But the government siphoned that amount off, and pissed it down a black hole.
That is what governments do. They fuck things up. That is why the statement, “That which governs least, governs best” , is so fucking true. It ain’t because small is automatically wonderful, it is because small can’t fuck things up as monumentally.

“As Americans continue to go through the motions, fantasizing about acquiring new, 5 bedroom, 4 1/2 bath Mcmansions, and the oh-so-cool his and her SUVs to match, we are getting good at pretending the big, fat, veined dildo pounding us isn’t making our hemroids flare up even worse.”
I don’t know of a single person who has the above fantasy. Excepting you as you bothered to write it down. Maybe you need to downsize your fantasy a bit.

Where have you been, Meathead? I mean for the last 20 or 30 years? I knew Beck followers were stupid, but you really blew the top off that delusion! Perhaps you live under a rock? Not surprising considering the raw sewage you’ve been spouting. Uncle Glenn and Aunty Sarah are screwing America, and especially your generation raw, and you don’t even know it. I can forgive your stupidity to a point, but you seriously have to be as deranged as your messiahs to believe an once of the crap they’ve spoon fed you. Lap it up, baby, cause eventually you’ll choke on it.

Shame on Liberals who call other White People racist at the drop of a pin. What the hell is wrong with you? It doesn’t mean anything – except “shut up, shut up or else.” Why can’t you all try to argue with decency and fairness? Are you so afraid that your arguments by themselves are so lacking in merit that you have to resort to slander? Or are you trying to win points with the invisble minority that has been planted in your mind to censor your thoughts? Don’t even try to win its approval – just get rid of it. It as well as the real minorities will never forgive you or us for being White and building a glorious civilization – one that they want to come to and take credit for. But deep inside they know they could have never done it, not in a million years.

“Uncle Glenn and Aunty Sarah are screwing America, and especially your generation raw, and you don’t even know it.”
Some specifics please. And you can forget “Aunty Sarah” as I have not mentioned her name. How is “Uncle Glenn” “…screwing America, and especially (my) generation raw…”? Please enlighten me oh, myrtlemyth.

“…but you seriously have to be as deranged as your messiahs…”
So I claimed someone, somewhere in my writings as being one of my messiahs? Where was that? You’re kind of screwy and a bit presumptuous are you not?

Scroll wheel is gonna be gettin’ a workout again…
Bilious babble by the bucketload;
Puerile prattle by the pantload;
Tiresome twaddle by the truckload;
Sneering, sophomoric sniping by the shitload… (etc.)

” I knew Beck followers were stupid, but you really blew the top off that delusion!”
By this you are saying that what you knew (Beck followers were stupid) was a delusion. You really don’t know what the fuck you are talking about do you? What a MORON.

Bravo – great ideas all. The Corporate Scumbags actually give seminars on how to get around the hiring laws and get more foreign workers in. And as far as I know, above and beyond all that, we are still bringing in over 100,000 legal immigrants every month from all corners of the world – of course very few from Europe. The massive influx is in itself enough to nix any nascent recovery in the bud, assuming such a thing were possible anymore anyway. And if there are no jobs for them, why the poor dears will just have to go on welfare. No problema. It’s not like we aren’t used to it. But the problem is that we aren’t infinitely strong. All of Nature has limits, human beings included. And the limits of our tolerance have already been exeeded.

And as far as I know, above and beyond all that, we are still bringing in over 100,000 legal immigrants every month from all corners of the world – VK
My question would be: why?
Knowing that will overload “the system” and cause the roof to fall in all that much sooner? Doesn’t seem too “big picture” thinking, does it?

Glenn Beck is a strong proponent of breaking down the separation of Church and State. His choice of allowing Dr. King’s Oreo niece, Alveda King, to speak at his rally says volumes. Beck is an advocate for the religious right. On the agenda is to overtune Roe v. Wade. Top on the list of victims of this idea is women having to return to the days of back alley, coat hanger abortions. They are your sisters. They are poor, white, hispanic, black – you name it. Beck believes in ending “entitlement” programs. He believes religion should fill the “needs” of our poor, elderly, and under served. We have all seen how the Catholic Church takes care of the lower classes, shrouding them in ignorance and fear while emassing shocking amounts of wealth and privilege for themselves. He is a laissez faire demagogue, pandering to the mass amounts of people who see big business as the heroes of our out-of-control, preditor based economy. He is the darling of the plunderers who helped get us into this mess to begin with.

Instead of reading entrails, Team Obama should be perusing the late Ivan illich’s ‘Tools For Conviviality” and some of his other works on subjects like ‘disabling professions’ and the gen’l tendency of bureaucracies to morph into priesthoods that disable people from doing what they used to do for themselves. Example: My father was born at home in 1930, but his younger brothers were born at a hospital several years later. Childbirth is about as natural as you can get, and i doubt that the medical priesthood makes things better for mothers and babies in good health.
If the GOP wants to take a stab at educating themselves, they could try “From Under the Rubble,” a ’70s collection of dissident essays that focused on the imminent doom of Communism. (One writer predicted 1980 as the year of systemic collapse, off only by a decade.) Solzhenetsyn’s address to Harvard also touched on these themes – the un-sustainability of materialist civilization, in both the economic and spiritual dimensions.
I am not waiting for either event to happen, but until the lights go out for the last time, i can enjoy Mr. Kunstler’s lively prose and worm’s eye observations of the slow-motion train-wreck that is our world.

the freedom of the individual to spend the money that is the fruit of their own labor.

So the Tea Party supports legalization of marijuana so people can spend the money they have earned?
So the Tea Party supports free choice for a woman to spend money she has earned for a legal abortion?

we support states’ rights

So the Tea Party does not understand that in Black history “states’ rights” is a racist dog whistle?
So the Tea Party recognizes states’ rights to legalize Gay marriage and does not interfere, does not support a federal DOMA?
And, finally, does the Tea Party believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and “free markets”?
Does the Tea Party recognize that unregulated free markets lead to unrestrained greed and environmental destruction and dead workers?

Another new metaphor from JHK:
===============
“The…developed world is watching two giant forces race each other to put an end to business-as-usual for industrial civilization.
….the catastrophe of debt and predicament of oil supplies. They had been running neck-and-neck for a few years
……these two forces are actually hitched in tandem, with the rickety cart of civilization bouncing perilously behind them
=================
ANYONE WHO DOES NOT FIND THIS SYMBOLISM ILLUMINATING needs to go back to grammar school literature class – you slept through an important lesson and you need your old teacher to smack you with a ruler until you understand symbolic speech.
————
And Chaz V. – Your long post that I linked to is worth a reread for anyone. Are all your ideas unique with you and do you have a blog?
Good stuff; and especially this idea:
============
“Three: Renewable Energy Investment
Oil is the problem. Renewable energy, made in America, is the answer.”
===========
Chaz, you are absolutely correct. I also voted for Obama, but had been only *vaguely* disappointed until the Gulf Oil Disaster.
Reality teed up an ENERGY home run ball for his administration. Obama drew back his mighty bat in that Oval Office speech. He took a mighty swing – and grounded out to first baseman Mitch
McConnell.
Now we’ve got to wait for the next (short-sighted and triangulating??) administration and the NEXT major disastrous energy crisis – if it’s not already too late.
Ah, what might have been.
I’ve been saying that a lot, lately.

A little late, but to clarify in my last post:
“Social Security has a surplus in theory, but the fund is indeed probably full of government IOUs, but that has something [I meant NOTHING] to do with SS being insolvent or a bad program.
Tzatza: You’re right the demographics were different when SS was created (people didn’t live as long, etc.), but that doesn’t take away from the fact that SS should be able to meet its obligations for at least a couple decades.
By “in theory” I simply mean that it’s a solvent program that was robbed to fund wars, etc.
Nonetheless, the assumption that SS will still be viable is based on the shit not hitting the fan for a long time — or ever.
I understand that we might all have to give a little — including SS recipients — to avoid some serious pain in the future. But instead of trying to wipe out SS, why doesn’t Obama’s Deficit Commission, oh…I don’t know… perhaps look at subsidized Wall Street bonuses first, or figure out a way to keep our once-vast wealth from falling down the dark hole of derivatives bailouts and endless wars?
Oh, wait, we can’t touch the rich in this country. That’s right. For we all dream of one day becoming the next Lloyd Blankfein.

Some of you newer readers of this blog may not know “tzatza” from earlier blogs. He is regularly banned for his boorish behaviour, and just as regularly comes back. His knowledge of how to get around being banned comes from having been banished from so many other blogs, that it’s an automatic reflex. Because he has been banned and comes back under different aliases, I hung the nickname pissant on him so he is more easily identifiable in whatever incarnation he appears. You can most easily recognize him by his unoriginal epithets (fucktard, moron) being the most common ones, and his schoolyard manners. He was the one with the off kilter expression and thick glasses with a patch on one eye, looking underfed, and hanging off the monkey bars while screaming uncontrollably. Remember him? There was one in every school. It’s easy to provoke him and kinda fun in a somewhat shameful way because he has no self control. He has no imagination whatsoever, lives in his parent’s basement, and has neither a girlfriend nor a life. Have I summed you up properly pissant? Or is there more that needs to be known?

Jim, right as always. And I love those who call you a lair, etc. They do, because they know you’re right, and it scares them to death. I have to say, you’re timing isn’t off, because the current admin, along with the crooks of Wall Street/central bankers are keeping this ship afloat, until the O man is done. I voted for him too, only to find out he’s a tool like all presidents. The super rich and the military control this country, which has never been a democracy – only in name. Finally, like you, based on what I read ONLINE, real news, this country and most folks are in for a rude awakening. The party ended years ago, and most don’t have a clue. Hell they still don’t know what Peak Oil is, or what has taken place since shit hit the fan. They still think things will return to normal. What a joke! Do you know how many people I know, who are between 20 and 25, and can’t find a real job? Lots. Guess what, they will be living at home, the rest of their lives. Not a bad thing, better then in the streets, but that’s reality now, and most have not come to grips with it yet. I say, they will in another 5 years.

There isn’t any Social Security. The Big Government Boyz took it and pissed it down an oxidized drain a long, long time ago. It was a pyramid scheme from the get go. Come on man, you must know that?

Reality check. Millions receive social security checks on time thanks to big government efficiency. The checks are not IOUs and can and are used to purchase real goods and support local businesses.
Here is the reality, for those still living in a reality based world: This year’s report by the trustees who oversee the fund found that, if left alone, the Social Security system will continue to be able to pay its bills for at least the next 40 years — thanks in part to a $1.4 trillion nest egg of Treasury securities that has been stashed away over the past several decades. ( A separate analysis by the Congressional Budget Office figures the fund is in good shape until 2052.)
ONLY AN IGNORANT FUCKTARD WOULD THINK SOCIAL SECURITY IS BROKE. THE CHECKS ARE REAL AND ON TIME. THE MONEY IS REAL AND BUYS REAL GOODS. THE SUPPORT PROVIDED TO MILLIONS IS REAL. THANK GOD FOR BIG GOVERNMENT.

Cows – I think you may have summed up a lot of the thinking of tzatza, using him as a proxy for the FOX news watching, Beck supporting right wing of this country when you said,
“Oh, wait, we can’t touch the rich in this country. That’s right. For we all dream of one day becoming the next Lloyd Blankfein.”
I think that’s it. I doubt many of the *real* rich are visiting websites and defending Mr. Beck.
But JHK tweaked some tea party noses last week – they are out in abundance on the thread this first day. They are fighting mad and they are not going to type it anymore!!!
================
And regarding Social Security – what the Hell! Now that my only wage type income is as an “independent contractor” I’ve become PAINFULLY AWARE THAT FICA GETS 12.4% of every dollar I earn. That’s real money. You’re damn straight I expect a return on it – or TS really will HTF!!

LOSING PRIVATE SECTOR JOBS = BAD
GAINING PRIVATE SECTOR JOBS = GOOD
Reality check: AUGUST WAS THE EIGHTH STRAIGHT MONTH OF PRIVATE SECTOR JOB GAINS
Health-care sector added 28,000 jobs in August
Construction employment was up 19,000 in August
The temporary-help industry, considered a precursor to broader hiring, also rebounded, increasing staffing by 17,000 in August.
The Labor Department also revised up the private-sector hiring in June and July, saying businesses added 168,000 in those two months.
The economy is getting better.
If the economy was getting worse, we would see job losses in the private sector. But the private sector is hiring again.

Captain,
I’d actually like to hear from tzatza some more. Like you, I was disappointed to see him descend into “Fucktard – moron land,” and hope that was a one time visit there for him.
And, of course, one of our “regulars” chased him down the rat hole of – “ignorant fucktard” ‘s. (?)
In tzatza’s defense I’ll have to say that that sort of language may be pretty common on the FOX and other right wing blogs.
I’m thinking he may be legitimately new on CFN.
Guess we’ll find out by the logic and future lack of profanity in his arguments. I hope.

Until this supposed recession, I’d not given much thought to how our economy operates, but whatever I knew seems to be eclipsed by a new economic regime which goes like this: government runs on taxes supplied by business, and individual workers, and when this is not enough, money is printed, and government deficit spends. But, incomes have been falling for decades, so taxes go up to compensate, and inflation, being non-zero, takes more and more of individual income. Meanwhile, our industrial policy becomes one of outsourcing, and the financial sector becomes 40% of GDP, vs 10 percent 20 years ago. Then we have the crash, and people aren’t buying, banks aren’t lending. So where will the money come from for ‘government?’ under a new regime where people stop using credit, and trade down?

My answer, is that government will continue to press in on individuals, with higher taxes, fewer services, privatization of local services (the next one will be water, where your bill will include paying a water co. CEO a million dollars a year). But government will just ‘assume’ that individuals somehow will find a way to higher paying jobs, that small business will find a way to make decent profits, with no national industrial policy at all. In other words, hand the public larger tax costs, and just assume they will ‘find a way,’ or else. The ‘else’ is what we are about to discover as a nation.

Will Americans continue to get a mortgage that they end up paying 3x the purchase price of the home the mortgage supports? Will they do likewise for consumer durable goods, food? One financial expert teaching a class at the local university points out that most people don’t pay their credit cards off, so the result is that each purchase actually carries not only the huge retail markup, but also a 70% markup when carried on a credit card on a large monthly balance.

Will Americans continue to buy into the “to appear rich I have to go into debt” game?

Two highly injurious thought forms are affecting our world culture and together they are a type of mental/emotional and spiritual poison that is affecting our very selves and the world we live in.
The first of these thought forms perpetuates the belief that we have dominion over the Earth and that she can be used and abused as we wish.
Part of the underpinnings of our current worldwide ecological crisis can be traced directly to this thought form that is expressed most succinctly in the book of Genesis.
Recently I read some writings by scholars suggesting that the King James translation of this text was actually a misinterpretation of the particular scriptural passage in question (Genesis 1:26-28). But misrepresented or not, it has fueled a human arrogance that underlies much of our philosophy as well as our cultural, scientific, and technological attitudes. The injury from this thought form is affecting our very ecosystem, the very fabric of life itself.
The second injurious thought form also traces its roots back to religion. This is the belief that we are somehow separated from our own Higher Self, Divinity, Godhead or whatever name you wish to call it.
The end result of this thought form is that we are banished from the realms of light and spirit by our own self-condemnation.
There is no separation between us and our Celestial Souls, our Higher Selves, or our Divinity (again, whatever names you wish to call it). We need no intermediary between us, and our divine nature.
And the perpetuation of this belief in our unworthiness prevents us from receiving the grace and healing that is our very birthright. This type of healing grace is streaming to us from another aspect of ourselves, not from a force outside of us.

Like you, I voted for Obama. I wasn’t particularly sold, or carried away by pre-election groundswell of adoration, but one had to consider the alternative. So, I did my best to hope.
Then, the day after the election, when he announced he would re-up Bernanke, Summers et all, I knew we had been sold.

“I voted for Obama.” What WAS the alternative? “NO-TRAIN McCain?” I just found out that Ronald Ray-Guns produced a sound recording in 1962 which decried the Communist menace of Socialized Medicine. (Thanks to my distant cousin Michael and his less-polemic-than-usual film “Sicko.”) Americans in most places, or should I say nowheres, are driving themselves into the ground. They will die hands clutched to the wheel. If only Boston were out in farm country. Tough choice here: Do I stay where there is some sanity, but risk starving, or go to where the towns have good farmland around them but have to deal with the Tea Party yahoos? Southeast PA looks better by the day but those areas that are far enough from Philly still seem like what I’ve seen in Oregon or New Hampshire; the private arsenals are there in case the you-know-whats-come boiling out of the cities.

I voted for Obama because I wanted a change and I have not been disappointed. Until 2008 all our presidents had been white men, some of whom were incapable of speaking English properly. Obama knows how to construct proper sentences and use recognized and legitimate vocabulary.
Obama had a proven record as a community organizer (trust me no “ruling elite” looks among organizers working with poor residents to turn them into presidents).
Obama had a proven record as a leader at Harvard, as a professor of constitutional law, as a state senator, as a national senator (during which he worked with Republicans on legislation re: ethics, loose nukes, etc.), and as a Christian in Rev. Wright’s church week after week. God bless Rev. Wright: he told the truth about America.
I do not regret my vote for Obama because on balance Obama has done so much that McCain/Palin would have never done. Even though Obama has continued many of Bush’s policies and Bush’s wars, and continues to fight with Bush’s recession, his supreme court nominees were good, and his social legislation saved the country from depression. Bush left in 2008 with the country losing 700,000 jobs a month. It took awhile but Obama turned that around.
Yes, it took deficit spending. And as Vice President Cheney said: “Deficits don’t matter,” especially when the economy was at the abyss.
Obama avoided having the Bush recession turn into a Bush economic depression. Now we are not even going to have a double-dip recession because the indicators are not there. The economy is improving slowly.

To see what Obama has accomplished on jobs … the community organizer has done far better than Bush “the MBA prez” … look at the “bikini graph” which clearly shows how job losses increased month after month with Bush, and how the job loss was reversed through Obama’s policies.
You can see the bikini graph here:bit.ly/aSNf8C
Red bars show how Bush tax cuts led to severe job losses. Blue bars show Obama’s policies created jobs.

Progressorconserve said: “And regarding Social Security – what the Hell! Now that my only wage type income is as an “independent contractor” I’ve become PAINFULLY AWARE THAT FICA GETS 12.4% of every dollar I earn. That’s real money. You’re damn straight I expect a return on it – or TS really will HTF!!”
I’m with you. That’s why we must shout until it makes our lungs bleed if they dare try take it away. We need to scare the shit out of them.
But we’ve got to be careful they don’t make our money worthless through quantitive easing, a way they can make everybody happy, at least for a time, including SS recipients AND Wall Street.
If they are going to keep SS solvent, we better demand that they make some cutbacks, pertaining to the rich, to keep our currency solvent as well.

Enough with politics already! I don’t care whether or not Obama knows what he’s doing, or if he’s a tool of bankers, or if Glenn Beck is a fatuous fool(a redundancy, I know, but the alliteration pleases me) or a wise man, or if The Republicans and the Tea Party and the liberals did this or that. Just as television has always been a soporific for the average American, so has been the discussion of politics among the more intellectual set.
We all have our opinions here on what is wrong with the world. I’d like to see more dialogue on the paths we can take to get to the best future for all or most of us – unless you all believe we’re doomed no matter what we do.
You guys seem to be Luddites who have no faith whatsoever in scientific and technological progress’ ability to solve ANY of our problems – just go back to late 19th and early 20th century living because there ain’t other options. Never mind that 6 billion people couldn’t survive a low-tech world, we have no choice but to write most of them off.
I blame this narrow and incorrect attitude on our society not being taught critical thinking.
Lack of critical thinking has arisen because those who have made decisions for us through the ages are afraid of the inherent power of the masses. The masses can be controlled by discouraging rational thinking.
Thinking clearly can be eliminated by fear, because fear overwhelms rational thought processes. The most effective means to induce fear are through organized religion combined with a visible physical force, and by disseminating anxiety through the media. By fogging our minds with fear our “leaders” can wield our own power for themselves.
Please try to truly learn critical thinking. I think that’s the only thing that will allow us to progress.

“You guys seem to be Luddites who have no faith whatsoever in scientific and technological progress’ ability to solve ANY of our problems”
Hi BeanTownBill. You are in danger of committing a cardinal CFN sin called the “techno miracle fallacy”
Anytime anyone brings up anything hopeful related to technology, it is immediately dismissed and the poster is accused of believing in techno miracles.
Objections will be raised citing elements from the CFN catechism: “the laws of physics,” EROEI, “it won’t scale,” “there’s not enough time,” and the catechism always ends with the obligatory comment: “we are so fucked!”
This is how any kind of hope is obliterated, any kind of positive action is paralyzed, human ingenuity is negated, and the status quo is maintained per saecula saeculorum. Amen.
CFN can be a grim place and trying to provide facts that contradict the bleak catechism is met with unalloyed sarcasm, with references to the poster’s “ruby shoes” or “rose-colored glasses” or “new age rubbish.”
The substance of a positive comment can thereby be ignored through name calling, and the requisite level of CFN pessimism is retained unperturbed.

Great post, Bill. But if we don’t get the big Wall Street bankers and various innovation-crushing monopolists under control via a political fix, the technological innovations that could indeed give us a decent life might not come into being.
From buying out small inventors — or simply crushing them — who stand to impact the corporate bottom line, to keeping the masses dumb by giving them the likes of Glenn Beck, big business and big banks are becoming a parasite within this great nation.

BeantownBill, over the years I have proposed many solutions to the energy problem facing the USA. All of these solutions working together provide a multi-faceted and synergistic solution to energy.
In each instance my proposals are met first with technical objections (of course, based on “the laws of physics” which is the CFN religion) and then someone will say “no way it will be able to replace coal or oil which we are dependent upon” so why try?
This has been the response whether it was solar-powered buses, wind power, tidal power, nuclear pebble bed reactors, hydropower, algae biofuel, space-based solar, natural gas cars, biomass, geothermal, compressed natural gas cars, etc.
Then a couple years later a technology CFN dismissed is being developed, tested, and in some cases scaled.
For example, it turns out the pebble bed reactors I spoke of several years ago can be factory mass-produced, and installed in place of the coal-burning units at existing coal plants. The Chinese are doing this.
By 2020 Chinese capability with their pebble bed program will have increased so that truly massive quantities of reactors will be able to be built yearly.
With modest improvements in design, for instance switching to thorium fueled reactors either in a CANDU or in a molten salt reactor, mean that fuel can be burnt at multiples of present efficiencies and supplies will last for many thousands of years at least.
But CFN posters tend to be reactionaries when it comes to technology, extremely skeptical, and they shut down debate rather quickly.

“It’s worse than you think.”
BeanTownBill, you can see from this comment the tenor of CFN. Sometimes there are secret societies who are secretly controlling the planet and that is why technology cannot be a solution.
Other times, without any kind of objective facts being offered, or critical thinking being employed a poster will provide some version of “we are so fucked” … something like “it’s worse than you think.”
You should also know that another CFN tenet is that TSHTF is coming soon. Things are so bad (“worse than you think”) that the whole economic system is about to collapse … maybe tomorrow afternoon at 2:00 p.m.
But, curiously, even though TSHTF is guaranteed, and we are going back to a WMBH, the world’s militaries will always have enough energy supplies to manufacture munitions, soldiers will always be fed, and CFN posters will always have their computers and an internet to communicate with each other.
These are contradictory beliefs, I know, but that’s how it is on CFN.
Also note, that although these societal collapses are guaranteed by the laws of physics and/or population biology, there is never a concrete date set. Jesus is coming back any day now, TSHTF any day now, but exactly when we can’t say.
You must have faith in physics and mathematics and have faith that the worst WILL happen!
In fact, it will be much worse than you can even imagine, according to the CFN eschatology.

I find it incredible that so many economists and smart people still believe that “More Demand for Goods and Services will Create More Employment”.
This no longer holds:
1) We live in mostly automatic societies – economies where most work is no longer needed, is automated, is optimized and will continually be further automated, optimized; the goal of any organization or company is to decrease, and decrease as much as is possible the number of employees it has, and this is what they will do no matter what;
2) Even if you do need “More Employees”, there are today so many options on the table: build factories in third world countries for people making 100 dollars a month salary; hire temp people for a month or two (heck even a year and then ax them) at low wages (since people have diminishing bargaining power, as being unemployed means your power is ZERO, you must accept whatever the Employer offers), make people work from the Internet (information workers beware), in this way you can choose from a pool of about 500 million people worldwide and choose the cheapest and best (Russian programmers are cheap and good), etc;
3) Even when demand increases, the relationship to Employment is non-linear, meaning that if a factory needs to build 30 % more cars it will not hire 30% more people, but jack up the working hours, working turns, and maybe hire a few temps (more like 3 or 4 % more). The same thing happens in Services and actually in Services most of the work is so phony and unnecessary that if demand increases I wouldn’t be surprised that they can make due with even less people, a negative relationship;
4) What we have today worldwide, in the globalized economy is a huge amount of Work Availability in terms of people that could potentially work, and a much smaller Need for this work, and the Need for this work is constantly going down with automation – computers – optimizations while the Availability is constantly increasing;
5) There is no counter force, no union, no nothing that is on the side of employees, the only thing that is happening is to make employees fight amongst each other for the breadcrumbs that will remain;
6) Services are supposed to create Employment, but only if people value or think the Services are worth the price: many are starting to doubt the real worth of “call centers”, Health Care Thieves of All Kinds, Education and Training towards imaginary jobs and positions that no longer exist, etc.
I find it amazing that in the Developed world there still are so many people “working”, I expect Unemployment to skyrocket in the USA, EU and JAPAN.
The only real solution to all of this is FREE SALARIES, that is what is needed, salaries of 1,000 dollars a month and CHEAP RENTS, rents of 200 dollars a month, no buying homes anymore or Home Ownership myth and crap. And a huge modern BUS transportation system, BUS MASS TRANSIT system (either public or private, doesn’t matter). I honestly cannot see how on earth, with present day technology and optimizations and the present combination of social forces, how on earth Employment is supposed to go up.
All economist and politicians keep on blattering the card of more “competitive” companies, more “productivity”, more “research”, etc.
1) Germany is increasing its manufacturing capability, was always strong, so this actually applies to a very small segment of the economies of the developed world, since most work in Services.
2) By using the logic of productivity of factories and manufacturing, these economists then shift it to all economic endeavors and pretend that all the forces that improve manufacturing improves also services such as more overtime, less pay, harsher working conditions, more flexibility etc.
3) Services don’t operate at all like this, but this translation of economic description is constantly being done to crush workers, to pay them less, to make them ever more flexible, just like factories (the goal is Vietnam style factories and working conditions).
4) The developed world has finished growing, USA, EU and JAPAN have gone from poor to middle class from 1950 to 1990 thanks to the same forces that are making growth in 3rd world countries possible: more money to workers, they buy more furniture cars, more money to schools, more jobs etc.
5) When a country is developed, growth is essentially over, it becomes a steady state economy like JAPAN or Italy. In fact these 2 countries have essentially stopped growing 15 to 20 years ago, their growth is over forever, no matter what they do or think.
6) The myth of growth is operating in China and India, etc. because it is easy to grow when you start from being so poor. Even a new car, or new furniture is a huge growth element in these countries, something that is taken for granted in the USA, EU and JAPAN.
7) Germany, JAPAN and Italy (the 3 losers of WW2) had huge economic growth from 1950 to 1990. They followed the textbook on economic growth, more cars, more factories, some technology, exporting, etc. But even after all that growth and the little more they have had from 1990 to 2010, their levels of consumption have remained no higher than about 20 to 30 % of the USA. This is because of cultural differences, they have smaller homes, they have less malls, their homes are concrete not wood like in the USA that easy to manipulate and hence a lot of home improvements: there is nothing like Home Depot or Lowes in JAPAN or Germany, etc. Homes outside the USA are smaller so they can’t fill them up with all the crap bought at WalMart, etc.
So the USA is the only real worldwide consumer, the rest are mostly exporters, but who are they going to export to now that the US is broke ?
JAPAN and Italy can’t grow, like most other developed countries either because of sky high home prices, either rent or buy, it is way too high, they protect the status quo of those who bought during the good times. But no economist ever mentions, CHEAP RENTS, LOW HOME COSTS so as to increase consumption and create some economic growth. JAPAN has spent trillions on useless “infrastructure”, but they never touched home prices, so young people can’t live on their own and start consuming. Even after 20 years of stagnation, they don’t care, the ruling class and status quo win all the time.
The major pattern is that the ruling class plays off the little guys each against each other and keeps them in place fighting each other.
8) Even if people don’t buy here (US) they buy in another part of the world, in those parts that are growing, so this has no effect on pressuring employers: look at the big picture, when they talk about competition, tax breaks, research, innovation they are saying and referencing millions of office workers worldwide and large corporations and government workers, not your local hotel. And they are basically saying, you don’t deserve more becasue you didn’t innovate, you cost too much, you are not competitive, etc. Very easy to attack workers on this, since it is impossibleto measure, and any measure will always show workers are at fault.
They never say CHEAP RENTS, CHEAP HOME PRICES, MASS TRANSIT so as to help people consume their money on goods and really make the economy grow.
9) The myth that small companies will generate the jobs we need. I can’t believe how idiotic all of these economists and politicians worldwide are in believing this BS. our economy is now worldwide and is the hands of fewer and fewer mega monopolies that have an iron fist stronghold on almost all of the economic segments: the Germans have a stronghold on luxury cars, Audi, BMW, etc. the US Silicon valley has a stronghold on Microprocessors and Computers and Software, Data centers, Internet etc. there is WalMart, Samsung (South Korea) on LCD TVs, etc. But the small companies will grow and hire the unemployed: the small mom and pop shop on the corner, that guy will hire more people, he is our hope (not the fact that WalMart ate all of his business), the US spends 200 billion dollars a year on Research equivalent to 5 million scientists a year pay, but a 1,000 smartass new inventors will bring up new companies with some great new invention and they will hire 1,000 employees, they will buy a few wires and transistors at radioshack and in their “garage” invent the next breakthrough 16 core CPUs against Intel.
Now in what kind of insane fairy land do all these people live ? How can they truly believe in all of this BS ? How come everyone drinks the cool aid ? Even if it were true these small companies could hire a million people at most, at the expense of a million people in New York or JAPAN or EU. But the fact is it is not true, it is just another ideological device of the right wing thugs, to fire employees from big companies, tell them to become inventors, and then blame it on them for not inventing the next big thing and not hiring other employees fired from the big companies.
10) Big organizations and companies and governments worldwide are the only ones that are really able to hire so many millions of workers, but the economists always play the little guys against each other: the small business owner against his crappy employees, it is always the fault of the “unions”, the no tax breaks for the small guys that would hire. In reality the tax breaks are only for the big guys, the small guys can’t hire anyways.
This is another example of rigged ideology and brainwashing, the small company myth, so everyone expects miracles from small people and small companies. The truth is we need big companies hiring millions with high pays, health care, and mass transit bus systems, cheap rents for high quality homes, not BS.
A million cars were sold in the US in August, with that money they could have set up 200 bus systems in each of the 50 most important urban areas of the US and started some kind of mass transit.
11) Another myth is manufacturing: manufacturing must come back to the US (or JAPAN or EU). It is not going to happen, it is cheaper to manufacture in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc. They can pay 200 dollars a month, in the developed world you can’t even pay the gas to get to work with that.
But they insist on taking manufacturing as the model, it is false: the developed economies are service, therefore all the ideology of manufacturing is false, like competition, productivity, etc.
And in the 3rd world there are millions of people available, it is easy to set up any kinds of factories anywhere, and it will take 30 years for them to get to 800 dollars a month salary.
And at best, manufacturing and factories can hire maybe 30 million people worldwide, what are you going to do with the other 100 million unemployed slobs ?
The fact is, when there are few jobs around, the workers are forced to accept whatever they can find at any price otherwise they end up homeless and in the streets.
A small outfit won’t hire hundreds, but all of this right wing ideology is created to play off the poor against each other, the little guys attacking other little guys, because of the joy to boot other people, because of the instinct to beat up someone. They are just a tool in the hands of the right wing thugs, they are referencing large organizations worldwide, large corporations, government workers, all those millions of people that everyone has been brainwashed to hate because they exist, because they should just drop dead and starve since they don’t deserve anything since they are not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and haven’t risked and become a billionaire. But the right wing thugs have a very precise intentionality and goal: that of booting them all, taking away all of their “entitlements”, their “health care”, their “rights”, the monopolies want it all, and they want everyone fighting everyone over breadcrumbs while they steal all the wealth and concentrate it in fewer and fewer hands.
12) Another myth is the myth of “Risk Taking”: they took risks and made it big, you didn’t take risks and deserve to be unemployed. Another insane idea, that everyone should be taking risks, and betting all their money on the totally idiotic invention they made in their garage (since millions of scientists and engineers worldwide are “too stupid” to have figured out your new cool invention). So the guilt complex is reinforced, the victim blames himself, the rich get richer.
People love to express and exercise their power, they love to decide the life of their employees and lay them off, boot them, they are programmed to fight and beat up people with this capitalist, free market mythology of “competition”, “productivity”, “hard work”, “deserving more than the other slob”, etc.
It won’t work in the long run, too many losers, too many people in a world where “competition” and “optimization”, and the race to the cheapest wage is becoming dominant. We need large corporations, organizations and governments hiring millions of people, even if they have nothing to do, since automation is taking away all the work that was once done in factories and offices. The only thing left is power struggles, status relationships, every encounter is a status challenge, there is no “common good”, only fights.
The world of labor is still stuck in the 1940s and 1950s when the factory and manufacturing and the “8 hour workday” was dominant, but this model is over, advances have essentially eliminated all work, it is all gone, deal with it.
13) By using the logic of productivity of factories and manufacturing, these economists then shift it to all economic endeavors and pretend that all the forces that improve manufacturing improves also services such as more overtime, less pay, harsher working conditions, more flexibility etc. Services have nothing at all to do with “productivity”, “competition”, in fact services operate better when there are less of them and less need of them, we don’t need more Health Insurance companies with all of their office workers wasting time, we don’t need more banks selling ripoff financial “products”, and especially:
WE DON’T NEED MORE RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY THAT IS KILLING THAT LITTLE WORK THAT IS LEFT. BY AUTOMATING EVERYTHING AND OPTIMIZING EVERYTHING, THERE WON’T BE ANYTHING LEFT TO DO IN THIS FAIRY TALE ECONOMY.
We need:
1 – FREE SALARIES OR BIG COMPANIES HIRING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AND GIVING THEM ALL THEIR BENEFITS LIKE PENSIONS, HEALTH CARE, ETC. JAPAN, FRANCE AND MANY OTHERS HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR DECADES ANYWAYS.
2 – CHEAP HOUSING EITHER RENTS OR PAY, LIKE 100,000 DOLLARS FOR A 2 BEDROOM HOUSE ANYWHERE WHETHER MANHATTAN OR OKLAHOMA (OR 200 DOLLARS A MONTH RENT).
3 – MASS TRANSIT SYSTEMS WITH BUSES, HIGH QUALITY BUSES AND INTERNET CALLED MASS TRANSIT NETWORKS.
14) Another myth is this idea of “competition” in the global economy, against other nations. Now 80 % of the economies of the USA, EU and JAPAN are services, therefore local, have nothing to do with competition in the industrial sense, like in manufacturing. But the ruling class and all their economists and politicians like to shift ideas valid in manufacturing in to the realm of services, brainwashing everyone that in their local – service job they are competing in a global economy against the Chinese and South Korean tigers, therefore they have to be “flexible”, decrease their “salary”, otherwise they are not competitive. But this is a lie and deception, global competition has nothing at all to due with 80 % of the service jobs.
We need heavy taxes on homes, so these home prices and rents collapse, we need 1% a year tax, so house of 200,000 must pay at least 2,000 dollars a year. No upper limit required. With that money the government can hire millions of young people in research and innovation, but for the common good and not for corporations and capitalists.

*In fact, it will be much worse than you can even imagine*
Nope…. I really don’t think so…. trouble is many if not most (thanks to Hollywood) do believe that a mouse click cavalry based technology will come electrically whizzing over the pixalated horizon….flying a CGI’d star-spangled-banner…
All hail the scientific saviours, we can relax now…the boogie mans gone, let’s pop home put the kettle on and get a dose of CCN or FOX…..
(Wakey…wakey America)
Me thinks you need Uncle Dmitry to b#tch-slap you back into the ever approaching reality…..culturechange.org/cms/content/view/674/66/
And no ma dears….it really ain’t gonna be pretty!
*sniggers*

Asoka and TreeBeardsUncle apparently think
that us denizens of CFN are just too
apocalyptic. Of course, the definition
of “too” is what is at stake here.
Well, are we “nutters” as TBU averred about
EightM?? I think not. Is Laurence Kotlikoff,
a great author and thinker at BU a “nutter”
for saying that the internals of our economy
are ALREADY worse than Greece? Is Martin
Feldstein a “nutter”? How about Nouriel
Roubini.
I would submit, in a continuation of last
week’s thread, that the REAL “nutters” are
people who cannot ADD and COMPARE numbers.
Like average household debt versus average
household income. Like government revenue
and government expenditure. Just for starters.
Anyone who can do elementary arithmetic will
arrive at truly farcical absurdities … like
an average household with an average mortgage
saving at maximum capacity will be able to
repay their debts in ONE-HUNDRED-FORTY-FIVE
YEARS given current installment credit card
rates and mortgage rates (which are VERY low).
Tune in tomorrow and for the rest of the week
because I’ll try to post more rollicking
comedy about what the DENIAL SQUAD thinks
can happen given EXISTING numbers in the
US Economy.
EightM is a “nutter”?? EightM actually made
his VERY BEST POSTS LAST WEEK … EVER.
E.

We need to move toward solar-powered buses like in Australia. The “Tindo” bus in Adelaide has electric power, which is stored in 11 ZEBRA sodium nickel chloride batteries capable of storing better than 260kWh of electrical energy, which comes from a AUD$550,000 Uni-Solar array mounted on the roof of South Australia citys’ central bus station.
Those panels generate an estimated 70MWh of electric power annually. These panels don’t actually directly charge the bus, but appear to feed into the local grid, which then is used, through a fast charger rated at 386V DC at 200a and 70kW, to charge up the bus’ battery pack at a rate of a mile per minute.

I WILL EXPOSE ALL OF THE DECEPTIONS THE MODERN ECONOMISTS, POLITICIANS AND CEOs USE TO KEEP THE MASSES BRAINWASHED1) We live in mostly automatic societies – economies where most work is no longer needed, is automated, is optimized and will continually be further automated, optimized; the goal of any organization or company is to decrease, and decrease as much as is possible the number of employees it has, and this is what they will do no matter what.2) What we have today worldwide, in the globalized economy is a huge amount of Work Availability in terms of people that could potentially work, and a much smaller Need for this work, and the Need for this work is constantly going down with automation – computers – optimizations while the Availability is constantly increasing.3) By using the logic of productivity of factories and manufacturing, these economists then shift it to all economic endeavors and pretend that all the forces that improve manufacturing improves also services such as more overtime, less pay, harsher working conditions, more flexibility etc.
Another myth is this idea of “competition” in the global economy, against other nations. Now 80 % of the economies of the USA, EU and JAPAN are services, therefore local, have nothing to do with competition in the industrial sense, like in manufacturing. But the ruling class and all their economists and politicians like to shift ideas valid in manufacturing in to the realm of services, brainwashing everyone that in their local – service job they are competing in a global economy against the Chinese and South Korean tigers, therefore they have to be “flexible”, decrease their “salary”, otherwise they are not competitive. But this is a lie and deception, global competition has nothing at all to due with 80 % of the service jobs.
Services don’t operate at all like this, but this translation of economic description is constantly being done to crush workers, to pay them less, to make them ever more flexible, just like factories (the goal is Vietnam style factories and working conditions).4) The developed world has finished growing, USA, EU and JAPAN have gone from poor to middle class from 1950 to 1990 thanks to the same forces that are making growth in 3rd world countries possible: more money to workers, they buy more furniture cars, more money to schools, more jobs etc.5) When a country is developed, growth is essentially over, it becomes a steady state economy like JAPAN or Italy. In fact these 2 countries have essentially stopped growing 15 to 20 years ago, their growth is over forever, no matter what they do or think.6) The myth of growth is operating in China and India, etc. because it is easy to grow when you start from being so poor. Even a new car, or new furniture is a huge growth element in these countries, something that is taken for granted in the USA, EU and JAPAN.7) JAPAN and Italy for example can’t grow, like most other developed countries mostly because of sky high home prices, either rent or buy, it is way too high, they protect the status quo of those who bought during the good times. But no economist ever mentions, CHEAP RENTS, LOW HOME COSTS so as to increase consumption and create some economic growth. JAPAN has spent trillions on useless “infrastructure”, but they never touched home prices, so young people can’t live on their own and start consuming. Even after 20 years of stagnation, they don’t care, the ruling class and status quo win all the time.8) Look at the big picture, when they talk about competition, tax breaks, research, innovation they are saying and referencing millions of office workers worldwide and large corporations and government workers, not your local hotel. And they are basically saying, you don’t deserve more becasue you didn’t innovate, you cost too much, you are not competitive, etc. Very easy to attack workers on this, since it is impossible to measure, and any measure will always show workers are at fault.They never say CHEAP RENTS, CHEAP HOME PRICES, MASS TRANSIT so as to help people consume their money on goods and really make the economy grow.9) The myth that small companies will generate the jobs we need. I can’t believe how idiotic all of these economists and politicians worldwide are in believing this BS. our economy is now worldwide and is the hands of fewer and fewer mega monopolies that have an iron fist stronghold on almost all of the economic segments: the Germans have a stronghold on luxury cars, Audi, BMW, etc. the US Silicon valley has a stronghold on Microprocessors and Computers and Software, Data centers, Internet etc. there is WalMart, Samsung (South Korea) on LCD TVs, etc. But the small companies will grow and hire the unemployed: the small mom and pop shop on the corner, that guy will hire more people, he is our hope (not the fact that WalMart ate all of his business), the US spends 200 billion dollars a year on Research equivalent to 5 million scientists a year pay, but a 1,000 smartass new inventors will bring up new companies with some great new invention and they will hire 1,000 employees, they will buy a few wires and transistors at radioshack and in their “garage” invent the next breakthrough 16 core CPUs against Intel.Now in what kind of insane fairy land do all these people live ? How can they truly believe in all of this BS ? How come everyone drinks the cool aid ? Even if it were true these small companies could hire a million people at most, at the expense of a million people in New York or JAPAN or EU. But the fact is it is not true, it is just another ideological device of the right wing thugs, to fire employees from big companies, tell them to become inventors, and then blame it on them for not inventing the next big thing and not hiring other employees fired from the big companies.10) Big organizations and companies and governments worldwide are the only ones that are really able to hire so many millions of workers, but the economists always play the little guys against each other: the small business owner against his crappy employees, it is always the fault of the “unions”, the no tax breaks for the small guys that would hire. In reality the tax breaks are only for the big guys, the small guys can’t hire anyways.A million cars were sold in the US in August, with that money they could have set up 200 bus systems in each of the 50 most important urban areas of the US and started some kind of mass transit.11) Another myth is the myth of “Risk Taking”: they took risks and made it big, you didn’t take risks and deserve to be unemployed. Another insane idea, that everyone should be taking risks, and betting all their money on the totally idiotic invention they made in their garage (since millions of scientists and engineers worldwide are “too stupid” to have figured out your new cool invention). So the guilt complex is reinforced, the victim blames himself, the rich get richer.It won’t work in the long run, too many losers, too many people in a world where “competition” and “optimization”, and the race to the cheapest wage is becoming dominant. We need large corporations, organizations and governments hiring millions of people, even if they have nothing to do, since automation is taking away all the work that was once done in factories and offices. The only thing left is power struggles, status relationships, every encounter is a status challenge, there is no “common good”, only fights.The world of labor is still stuck in the 1940s and 1950s when the factory and manufacturing and the “8 hour workday” was dominant, but this model is over, advances have essentially eliminated all work, it is all gone, deal with it.12) By using the logic of productivity of factories and manufacturing, these economists then shift it to all economic endeavors and pretend that all the forces that improve manufacturing improves also services such as more overtime, less pay, harsher working conditions, more flexibility etc. Services have nothing at all to do with “productivity”, “competition”, in fact services operate better when there are less of them and less need of them, we don’t need more Health Insurance companies with all of their office workers wasting time, we don’t need more banks selling ripoff financial “products”.WE NEED:A) EITHER FREE SALARIES OR BIG COMPANIES, ORGANIZATIONS OR GOVERNMENTS HIRING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE EVEN IF THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO, AND I REPEAT “EVEN IF THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO”SINCE THESE ARE THE ONLY ENTITIES WORLDWIDE THAT CAN REALLY HIRE MILLINS AND MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, GIVING THEM ALL THEIR BENEFITS LIKE PENSIONS, HEALTH CARE, ETC. JAPAN, FRANCE AND MANY OTHERS HAVE BEEN DOING THIS, IN STEALTH MODE, FOR DECADES ANYWAYS.B) CHEAP HOUSING EITHER RENTS OR PAY, LIKE 100,000 DOLLARS FOR A 2 BEDROOM HOUSE ANYWHERE WHETHER MANHATTAN OR OKLAHOMA (OR 200 DOLLARS A MONTH RENT).C) MASS TRANSIT SYSTEMS WITH BUSES, HIGH QUALITY BUSES AND INTERNET CALLED MASS TRANSIT NETWORKS. Many other third world countries are gradually evolving from being agriculture dominant towards manufacturing and services. All of these extra new workers will just nail the final coffins in the ability of workers in the developed world to find any kind of work at all. BEWARE.A million cars were sold in the US in August, with that money they could have set up 200 bus systems in each of the 50 most important urban areas of the US and started some kind of mass transit.

“Glenn Beck is a strong proponent of breaking down the separation of Church and State.”
Really? Please steer me towards anything he has said that reflects this.
” His choice of allowing Dr. King’s Oreo niece, Alveda King, to speak at his rally says volumes.”
She’s an Oreo? Really? And that is because she does not toe the line in some fashion as to how you think a black woman should think or act? My how big of you.
Are you aware that she served as a Democrat in the Georgia States House of Representatives and supported Jesse Jackson for President? I thought not. (Fucking MORON!)

I don’t like the atmosphere around here very much when the pissant is on the loose. Fortunately, with what’s on the way, there are plenty of other things that need my attention. But before I run for a while I thought I’d repost the pics of development of our $3000 “house” conversion to a functioning permaculture site. Long way to go still, but you can see what’s transpired over the last 5 months:flickr.com/photos/45300880@N05/sets/72157624873863534/
And if anyone wants to chat with me while I take a little leave of absence, come on over to my blog. If I’m not messing around here, I’ll probably get a lot more done over there!smallbatchgarden.blogspot.com/
And if you happen to miss me, you can thank one of the biggest pieces of shit to ever disgrace this forum.

“The New Deal cost America $50 billion in 1930s dollars. How the times have changed – today the White House will announce a new and improved New(er) Deal, which will invest $50 billion in a 3Rs sequel – road, rail and runway, infrastructure developments. It will have roughly one thousandth the impact of the Roosevelt plan, demonstrating once again that in 80 years the only thing that has actually worked in America is the ongoing devaluation of the dollar.”zerohedge.com/article/obama-unveil-newer-deal-here-comes-50-billion-rails-roads-and-runways
The other thing that actually may work, Mr. Obama hitting the campaign trail, some people will beleive anything!

Debunking Myths of the CFN Thread:
Several posters have bemoaned the “political” discussions on this website.
Question: What other venues than “politics” does society have to drive decision making?
=============
Other posters suggest that the “left vs right” paradigm is of no value.
Reason: In national politics the US doesn’t have a “left vs right” choice. We have “hard right” vs “center right.” The honest progressive left is long gone – buried under hatred of unions and love of *free market capitalism.*
Nevertheless, political action is the only alternative our Nation has except for:
1. Dying sick, poor, and broken
2. Lingering on in a sadly collapsing country.
Chaz, upthread, is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT about solar and alternative energy being a practical salvation!
Please repost, Chaz!

Pessimism VS. Optimismkunstler.com/blog/2010/07/my-tea-party.html
New CFN’ers need to be sure to take a look at this link. JHK can be a practical optimist, as his TEA party proposal shows.
Beyond that, IMO, it is reasonable to have a certain level of pessimism on these threads.
I like to come here for a dose of pessimism and to sharpen my thinking. Then I head out into the REAL WORLD to try to make things better for:
My Family
My Country
My Planet
================
PS to Tripp and the Captain. I don’t believe tzatza is the original notmommy/pissant. If he continues with the gratuitous vulgar name calling, maybe we can christen him pissant II.
I agree with you that that sort of thing is the first retreat of weak minds and really screws up the discussion.

Loves the way you say it JHK.
Going local isn’t just the way we’re going to have to go, it’s also the best strategy for living, breathing and getting through the day, an individual path as well as a collective one.http://www.RadicalRelocalization.com

You are so right about needing a new rail system in this country. It is a slow, inadequate system. The tracks have been laid now we need the trains to go with them. However, could you image the people (like the spoiled Hamptons crowd or some young college age person) working on the railroad. They would rather starve to death first. The other thing that sometimes bothers me about the right and left fighting for no reason at all is the inability to see that the entire system is set up to keep us fighting with each other. It is obviously a one party system and no one really knows that this “party” stands only for itself. We are considered the pigs in the stye for them. They throw us some insignificant bone to chew on and keep doing what they want. They very fact that the nation fell for Obama, (or so they tell us) is proof that people still believe the lie.The great lie starts in elementary school, with history and what ever else they want to brainwash you with. It has always been a world that will suck you into the lies if you believe them or pay attention to them. Jim, it seems as if your life is an example of how more people should live.(even though I don’t personally know you.) LIVE YOUR LIFE TO THE BEST OF YOUR ABILITY; BE HAPPY WITH YOUR CREATED INNER WORLD; DO GOOD DEEDS ALTRUISTICALLY; MAKE YOUR LIFE SIMPLE; AND DON’T GET SUCKED INTO THE LIES. The Governement and even religions are really only out there to control your lives and make you their slave and ultimately very unhappy. Stay away from negative people as much as possible. (except for this website of course)Life is too short, enjoy it while you have your health, and always extend a hand to someone who needs it. And most importantly, if you see someone suffering, step in and fix it, remember, someday you may need someone to help you.

You are so right. You left out the idiots on CNN and MSNBC. They are all a bunch of people who talk, talk, talk, and never accomplish a single thing in their personal lives to help the sad state of affairs. They are entertainers first, enjoying their 15 minutes of fame.

“Other posters suggest that the “left vs right” paradigm is of no value.
Reason: In national politics the US doesn’t have a “left vs right” choice. We have “hard right” vs “center right.” The honest progressive left is long gone – buried under hatred of unions and love of *free market capitalism.*
Nevertheless, political action is the only alternative our Nation has except for:
1. Dying sick, poor, and broken
2. Lingering on in a sadly collapsing country.” -PoC
I absolutely agree that the “spectrum” of today’s political [so-called] thought is strictly (and heavily) weighted towards the right. Convincing the folks that rich, greedy, venal shit-bags should be their rulers has been strangely effective. THAT sets us lowly subjects against one another, by way of economic and representative winners and losers. (Who will join the very thin upper-crust, and who will descend into the ocean of the destitute.) These differences become more pronounced as the paper economy is exposed and burns away, of course, turning those who have not prepared for ANYTHING towards the authoritarians (who then promise them EVERYTHING in return for absolute fealty).
Sooooo; the BIG innovations and BIG changes have to be accomplished locally. The people “in charge” have only one objective: to stay in charge through any means available. I’m thinking you’re right about “political action” being the only alternative to a truly vicious future, but upon where that action ORIGINATES we may differ significantly.
Something to chew on for a fast-approaching future. (…that relates to JHK’s thread, BTW ;o) Thanks for that.

Jim baby, you forgot to mention the real problem that is facing us. How could you not at least have one passing reference to the problem that is going to really do us in – that make the debt and oil problem just white noise. Remember this number 390ppm increasing by 2ppm per year. Does this trigger anything for anyone?

This morning I was listening to some of Obama’s labor day speeches on NPR. Platitudes about him working “day and night and night and day” to create jobs. Yeah, if you want a job placing orange cones on freeways, I guess you’ll be in luck.
Then I opened the San Jose Mercury News and saw a full-page ad taken out by a big church — the Cathedral of Faith — about upcoming “stars” that will be giving sermons on Sundays.
So if ya’ll want to come to San Jose on 10/3 you can see and hear “DOG THE BOUNTY HUNTER” tell his story of “struggle, redemption, and bounty hunting.” OMG!
What I’d rather see is Dog-the-Bounty-Hunter, rounding up some Wall Street banksters.
SJmom

Asoka,
Which goes directly to my comment on Luddites. I suppose there has always been discussions about the undesirability of advancing through technology.
I imagine a scenario, in a cave 100,000 years ago, where the biggest, baddest dude is concerned about losing control of the cave-dwellers to the little, half-blind weakling who has suggested that fire can be created at will from sparks made by striking a piece of flint just so.
The big dude-leader says that it’s too difficult, too undependable and takes too long to get fire this way. What happens when the SHTF during the next howling winter (look at the trend – the past few winters have been getting worse and worse. The glaciers are coming closer and closer to us),and we need a fire to keep warm, and we have to stake our lives on a few pieces of flintrock.
Better to wait for lightning to set fire to a bush and scoop up a burning branch. This way the leader can direct teams of men to scour the countryside during a thunderstorm, and reward the person who brings back the fire, while telling everyone else they’re lucky he’s around to take care of everybody.
It’s a good thing that the cave-dwellers didn’t listen to him.

Yep, the weather/climate will have everything to do with everything soon. That reinforces my theory that anything that CAN be done to adapt will have to be done locally. (We’ve seen how [in]effective “foresight” and “solutions” are, when coming from centralized powers in these times. Hell, they aren’t even concentrating on bridges while we’ve still got some resources; we’re gonna be needing those, if even for horse-and-cart traffic. Automobile-friendly roads; aircraft runways?? You’ve got to be shitting me… um… mebbe not.)

What I don’t understand is why you would let someone else’s behavior dictate your own actions (not stcking around here)? The simplest way to be rid of this nuisance is to ignore him. If no one ever commented on his posts, he might continue to rant a little for a while, but eventually he would go away.

“But misrepresented or not, it has fueled a human arrogance that underlies much of our philosophy as well as our cultural, scientific, and technological attitudes.”
You don’t see the problem here? You cite one passage, and admit that it is misrepresented, and then attribute the error to the original source. Whatsupwidat?
“The nations were angry with you, but now the time of your wrath has come. It is time to judge the dead and reward your servants. You will reward your prophets and your holy people, all who fear your name, from the least to the greatest. And you will destroy all who have caused destruction on [to] the earth.”
Exercising “dominion” is a stewardship [under law], not a licence to steal, kill and destroy.gods-kingdom-ministries.org/BOOKS/birthright/Chapter1.cfm

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome.
The rally is over now.
Take a look at this:
Dow-80.22down-0.77%
10,367.71
Nasdaq-17.90down-0.80%
2,215.85
S&P-9.26down-0.84%
1,095.25articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Dispatch/market-dispatches.aspx?post=1801242&_blg=1,180…
Stocks fall on European debt fears
The recent stress tests on European banks reportedly understated risky debt levels. Gold prices rise as the dollar gains value. Barclays names Robert Diamond as its CEO.
Here is the latest on ABX gold!
46.16up +0.86 +1.90%fyi
NEW Real Time: 46.19+0.89/+1.96% 12:47 PM ET [Real-Time Quote Help]
Guess who bought ABX gold last week, on Wed and Thursday? Why that would be me.
True, I didn’t get very much, and I got it a little higher than I could have, at $45.24 or so, but it was still a good bet. I sold 50 shares and kept 50 in case the market indices go lower this week and gold goes higher.
Bill Fleckenstein from MSNBC stated in an article earlier this weak that gold goes up when people lose faith in a currency. There was another article that said Greece should default on its debt within 3 years and may have to leave the EU.
So, anyway could see that bad news was coming in the beginning of this week.
Some would say that the US economy is a fly-blown bloated corpse covered up with mascara, rouge, lip-stick and talcum powder. The brokers and lenders and real estate agents want you to give it a big kiss. You look lonely over there Eleutherio, handing the carcas to that jaundiced pessimistic demeaning prick.

If everyone would just go buy more stuff with their credit cards, the great recession would end, Mr. Kunstler would open a cheese doodle speciality shop in Syracuse, NASCAR would become bigger than football, Tiger Tim (the Pile Driver) Conway and Dusty Rhodes would admit to years of steriod abuse, and Sweet Sarah Palin would bless us with a book about raising a model US family.
That’s all you have to do. It’s up to you Mr. Consumer

Ok. So exactly when is the good news and bad news going to come in? Here you go. The Democrats want good news to help them win the election. The Republican want bad news to get their fat fascist corporatist asses back in the chairs of power. This country has been run by Republicans since the Civil War. So I figure we will have bad news the next month or so most of the time and then some good news right before the elections to help the democrats. The third quarter earnings reports will look good. Manufacturing will do alright. I don’t know housing will fare this quarter. I think sales and prices will be up slightly and then fall quite a bit in the winter. Incomes and consumer spending will be weak. Employment results will be mixed. Triple witching — options expiration — will occur in late October so we should get a little dip right then. On the back-side of the election expect some bad news before the Christmas fluff. Then late in January – early March the PTB should really let a lot of bad news come in as folks have been told that fall 010 is when things will have been tough and that times are looking up in 011 and 012.
Here is the plan. The suckers and fools and rubes are going to be coaxed in like this. “Here, little lambs. Everything is fine. There is nothing to worry about. It is safe now. Come back into the markets. Charge up your credit cards. Take out some housing loans. Go to diploma mill U. Then when they are well corralled, their heads will be chopped off. They will be cut off at the knees. They will be fleeced, milked, sliced and diced so that the rich will get richer. Note that 1% of the population owns 88% of the stocks in America. Will send some info on wealth inequality later this evening or tomorrow.

MD, I could respond to you but it would require a philological exegesis involving Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin.
Out of respect for ProCon, who is tired of reading our exchanges about religion, I am going to refrain.

Jim goes for 7,000$.
I heard 2 startling things about children in USA recently…both from mainstream media..
GRAND PRIX BRINGS FAMILIES TOGETHER.. 3 year olds race on motorcyles built for them and 12 year olds race at 130 miles per hour!
and….doctors medicating year old infants with powerful psychotropic meds for
‘ psychosis ‘..this was on NYT page 1.
and…. ‘My own view — I might be wrong– is that we are going through an epochal compressive contraction, which is the opposite of growth..’
yes youve been saying this for years…quality of life is contracting and growth is over,,,,
cept for population growth.

‘we are still bringing in over 100,000 legal immigrants every month from all corners of the world ‘
does that include ancor babes and illegals or is the figure legal immigrants to this once great nation?

‘I lost 7 of them to a pack of rogue pitbulls later on, and 13 of the 14 Dark Cornish roosters are about to meet their maker’
that was cold..to put yr baby birds pix there, before you kill em!
and stary pitbulls..careful they kill poeple regularly, most lethal dog attacks are from pitbulls.

asia said: “does that include ancor babes and illegals or is the figure legal immigrants to this once great nation?”
This is still a great nation, except some gullible and easily manipulated people have fallen for the Anchor Baby Myth.
The Anchor Baby Myth is the erroneous belief held by many Americans that if an alien has a baby in the US, the alien has the right to remain in the US legally.
But haven’t you ever wondered why there are over ten million illegal immigrants if all they had to do to fix their status was have a baby here?
Maybe it’s not so simple.
A child born in the US is a US citizen, but the immigration benefits to the parents are extremely limited. After the alien mother (or father) has been present for no less than ten years, the alien may apply for Cancellation of Removal (aka “Cancellation”) if she can prove ten years of good moral character and that deporting her would be an exceptional and extremely unusual hardship to her US citizen child.This is an unusual form of relief as there is an annual cap of 4000 on the number of illegal immigrants who can be granted Cancellation, and for the past several years the government has not reached that cap.
This means that under 4,000 people are granted this type of Cancellation annually.
Once the child turns 21, he can file a visa petition for the parent. The Restrictionists
present this information as though it then becomes a simple matter of filing paperwork.
What they don’t tell you is that if the parent entered without inspection, the parent is not
able to apply for a green card from within the US. She would have to apply for a visa at the consulate. But because she was previously unlawfully present for more than a year,
she will be banned from entering the US for ten years. As the child is not a qualifying
relative for a waiver of this ground of inadmissibility,5 she would not be able to return to the US legally for ten years despite have a US citizen child over age 21.
Even if the parent had entered the US lawfully and/or were not subject to the ten-year ban, the adult child would still need to prove that he has enough income to support the parent(s) and himself at no less than 125% of the poverty level. Under the 2009 poverty guidelines, a person wanting to sponsor both parents would have to show he makes at least $22,8876, an income level many 21-year-olds have trouble achieving.
The child may seek a co-sponsor to help meet the income requirement, but even so, it’s clear that
legalizing one’s parents takes more than the mere filing of papers. Every year many US citizens petition for their parents, but there is no indication that US-born children of illegal immigrants are filing a majority of parental petitions.
Restrictionists attempt to increase the rage against Anchor Babies by painting them as a
drain on society; as US citizen children they would have access to public benefits, such as
Medicaid and Food Stamps, even if the alien parents are not eligible.
However, this claim that Anchor Babies are an economic drain on society fails to take into account the taxes and other economic contributions that the US citizen child will pay over a lifetime.
In a 2007 report by the White House Council of Economic Advisors, it is estimated that over a lifetime, immigrants and their descendents contribute $80,000 more in taxes than they receive in public services.
I’m really tired of the “secure the borders” crowd repeating false information regarding immigrants. We have many bigger problems to address. Immigrant bashing, like the Anchor Baby Myth, is a waste of time.

Triple witching — options expiration — will occur in late October so we should get a little dip right then.
===========
Wrong Tree, it occurs the third Friday of Sept (then Dec, Mar and Jun). Always the end of a quarter .. duh.
Re ABX, my recommendation to you is NOT to make public predictions as to stock price movements, economic stats, etc. And if you feel compelled to do so, couch them in generalities. The more specific the predictions the more certain you’ll look foolish more than half the time. (Note how JHK always leaves some wiggle room in his predictions.)
And BTW, you originally said you bought “around 300 shares,” then you were more specific and said you bought 350 shares, and then at 12:56PM today you said you sold 50 shares and kept 50. If you’re going to brag about your prowess in the market you’ve got to keep your story straight ’cause there are always pedants like me watching.

Technology will neither save or defeat humanity. Humanity will do itself in. First we use then we abuse and every gain we make in/using/through technology we always lose our way and then watch the gains became deficits both materially and emotionally [think spyware].
Humanity still has not come to grips with itself since the Industrial Revolution. Since then we have spent more time losing our way especially WRT our social interaction.
Now “science/technology” is telling us that soon, rather than later, we will no longer be solely a biological entity but rather an bio-mechanical entity. BTB I think that this “statement” has nothing to do with all our advancements in medicine [hip replacement, dr. evil dick cheney’s heart, yada, yada, yada] but rather speaks of “exploring and tinkering with the brain/mind”.
Ahhh so cometh our brave new world – one master countless drones.
The dumbing of america, principally thru tv, is near completion. The question that remains is will america, as a whole, basically become as dumb as a bag of nails or will the spaceship earth just rid itself of all human beans first.
For me it is to close to call and I mean this sincerely.
When I was a teenager growing up I truly believed that humanity would do itself in [over population was, and still is, my main concern] however this would happen long after I am dead. For me this is no longer the case and again this one is to close to call.
The one redeeming aspect being that given death is the loneliest journey each human makes then just imagine the party we’ll enjoy when 100’s of 1000’s of us die at the exact same instance.
BTB it ain’t doom and gloom if it unfolds as forecasted. It’s known as being ahead of the curve [a little something for the technocrats].
Teach your children to lie and lie well otherwise they will be devoured whole either by one of our glorious systems or their classmates.
CC.

Here we go with the economic growth caused by immigrants again:
============
However, this claim that Anchor Babies are an economic drain on society fails to take into account the taxes and other economic contributions that the US citizen child will pay over a lifetime
===========
Is it not possible that the US population is too large and productive already?
Is it not possible that the larger and more productive the US population, the more of the World’s resources we will continue to command?
Is it not possible that the larger the US population, the greater the propensity for “Defense” and war on our behalf?
Asoka, there are NO internal controls on birthrates for persons residing in the US, whether legally or not.
What is your opinion of a suitable upper limit for US population?
Why stop at half a billion, if we in the US can continue to extract resources from around the Planet?
My “indefinite time” has ended. I think local, regional, Planetary population always deserves the attention of CFN.
And MD, I actually enjoy some of your insights and weblinks concerning your particular brand of Christianity.
I just see no point in DEFENDING it to someone who is not of your faith.

Exactly.
All this hand-wringing over what’s happening on Wall Street and in the backrooms of corporations and political corridors of power isn’t going to mean squat when one considers that all the critters that creep, crawl, fly and swim on this planet are being obliterated en-masse thru our depradacious ways. And for those who naively believe in the abilities of modern science to solve all our problems, we WON’T be able to technologically get ourselves out of the precipitous annihilation of thousands of species and the subsequent havoc that will ensue. All those who have kept their billions of dollars won’t need it on a depleted and totally exhausted earth.
The seas and the atmosphere are changing before our very eyes… and in only a few generations. These are colossal changes never witnessed before in recorded history. We have NO IDEA what the impact of these changes will be. BAU for almost everything will be a forever moving and indefinable target. Societies will resemble schools of fish being attacked by predators, darting in one direction one second to avoid a threat only to change course suddenly to react to the next threat. Predictability of almost anything will be history.
Why should this matter? As Rachel Carson pointed out 50 years ago the dark truths of how important our interdependency on the environment is with her expose on pesticide use, one realizes today that not much has changed, or at least not much seems to have been learned.
A local farmer informed me that the Japanese Beetle was introduced here to deal with the purple loosestrife choking out the wetlands. Apparently this new beetle has a voracious appetite for corn, raspberries and a host of other fruits and vegetables. The result, as my friend lamented, is that farmers are now “spraying the shit out of their fields… once every couple days”. So much for “buy local”. These poisons and toxins are inexplicably tied into our food chain. (Could that explain some of the madness?)
Everything is out of whack because we are constantly interfering with it. We’re “managing” forests, and “managing” wildlife and “managing” fish stocks and “managing” insect populations and “managing” plant species and, and, and, and… trying desperately to tweak and maximize. Yet, on the overall, we’re doing a rotten job. Canada’s Oceans and Fisheries “managed” the cod fishery into near obliteration.
I am fearful that we won’t have choices in the not-so-distant future. The collapsing eco-system will make those decisions for us. And they won’t be consequences that money will be able to assuage.

I am not trying to look good. Am just trying to get information out of people. I had bought that many shares of ABX last week. I sold 200 of those shares on Friday and sold another 50 after hours that should have gone through on Monday. I sold another 50 later today and still have 50 left. ABX did go up today a fair amount so I made a little more. I am going to continue to give fairly exact prediction about stock prices and times. Am still waiting for a significant dip. My mom thought triple witching occured in late October. If it is late September that is fine with me too. It is not very far off in any case.

So next up is the Beige Book report and then the weekly unemployment report which will come out on Thursday. I don’t know exactly how folks will react to the BB report. However, the reaction to the unemployment report cannot be more positive than it was to the report made last Friday. That time folks were expecting a very negative report and the fact that the report was mild was taken as very good news. This time traders will view the employment situation with a more critical eye and may actually sell on the news. Note that the rally has passed. My mom said that the market would go down after Labor Day.

And here is another thing, Q and E, etc, I am using a basic principle of psychology here having to do with men and women. Women are more concerned about guarding themselves through secrecy and are unlikely to give information to correct people. Most guys are mean-spirited jerks and are so set on putting people down, that they will give information in order to do that.

This is up the alley of the pessimistic recluses here:newsweek.com/2009/10/30/boom-and-gloom.html
Boom and Gloom
Investors are bidding up stocks, gold, and oil to dizzying heights. It’s déja vu all over again.
Note that a prediction of the DOW falling into the 7000 to 8000 range matches that of one of the statements made in response to my question last week:
Or, more accurately, an echo bubble. It’s a term economists use to describe the smaller bubbles that follow on the heels of major ones, usually after the authorities helicopter in loads of cash to patch up the first round of damage, setting the stage for a second round of easy-money-driven speculation. The phenomenon has been observed throughout history, from the British railway bubble of 1830 to the Saudi stock bubble of 2005. Edward Chancellor, author of Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, says, “Echo bubbles tend to be smaller and fade away faster than the first bubble.” On average, they reach about 30 to 40 percent of the size of the original before bursting and sending market values back down to where they should have been all along, wiping out the gains of the echo, but generally not dipping back to the previous low. That implies a Dow falling to 7000 or 8000.
PS
(I am almost entirely in cash now.)

Incidentally, Asoka, I did not predict $240 for apple today. Rather I am looking to buy back in when it reaches that level probably in about 2 to 3 weeks. I was aiming to sell more ABX today, which I did after it went UP a little over $46/share when the DOW dropped, about 80 points when I sold the ABX, and about 100 points by markets close.

Beantown Bill,
You say, “Why not get a dose of optimism and face the world energized and upbeat instead of feeling dread and acting in fear?”
Instead of saying I come to CFN for a dose of pessimism it would be more accurate to say that I come for a unique dose of reality.
And I’ve generally disciplined myself through the years to act in fear as little as possible.
I can express myself here as a progressive, conservative, pragmatist – or simply go unlabeled.
And then count on the minds of CFN to try to “straighten me out,” if they should so desire.
I am completely surrounded by Cassandras in the real world, people who refuse to consider PO, peak population, peak environment – or peak anything except Peak Life Continuing the Same.
Is this common in Boston?
How about other areas?

Caution: troll-feeding ahead.
walt | September 6, 2010 10:20 AM | Reply
Walt was likely born in to that miraculous place that the USA was after 1945 and before 1955, because younger folks don’t expect it to be all-okay with unicorns that poop golden sweet skittles. Now that we have generational warfare on the table, I really miss my Grandparents who were born before WWI.
“There’s no guide here to such an epochal undertaking.”
BS- Here’s your guide: people die like flies when civilizations crash. Rome went from the biggest city in the world (AD ~200)to a place to graze goats among ruins (AD~700). We won’t take 500 years- I’m guessing 30 years.
We get thirsty, hungry, get vitamin-deficiency diseases, get cold, pick up oral-fecal route diseases (hepA, cholera, etc.), or crowding/airborne nasties like XDR-TB, and die a horrible lingering inside-out death that leaves an infectious mess for others. That’s for previously-healthy folks, old/weak/crippled/drug-dependent/obese/alcoholic/unarmed people won’t even get through the first winter. Pre-dug mass-graves just outside of urban areas might be very useful before the heavy equipment stops running. Digging with shovels is hard when you are hungry and the ground is cold. Look at rural Somalia, but with 300M people who don’t know how to cope without iPhones and web access. Actually, your iPhone and wireless web might work for a long time after you can’t get food/water. Some of us might make it, and it won’t be because we are this color or that. We might make it and help others to because our Scout Leaders gave us something useful.
Expect 70M dead by spring if the power goes out in October. That’s a fierce smell and bunch of rancid meat to contend with in the spring. Don’t worry, wild dog packs will get a taste for decaying human flesh, just like they did in Iraq, and have big litters of hungry puppies. Things have a way of working themselves out.
“I agree Obama is a disappointment.”
Not to me. I read his books in 2007. He told all, like all Great Leaders do in their books.
“Kill all the blacks? C’mon.”
Where did this come from? I’m recruiting Blacks as much as I can. They are sturdy people who aren’t hallucinating as much as average about the situation on the ground. Their 90%+ support for a half-African hereditary CIA asset socialist raised by unAmerican white people is curious to me (the POTUS is far-away and hardly matters daily), but American Blacks are my people, more than most American Whites, at least the Christians and GI/Vet’s are.
“…Teabagging idiots..”
You make a lot of friends with this?
JFYI: The “Tea Party” is not a political party, they are events that every American is invited to. The Republican Party would like to co-opt the participants at Tea Parties, but without success. As Gary North recently mentioned, the Republican/Neo-Con party is mostly on-board with Marx and his 10 planks of Communism, perhaps to a slight degree less than Barry and his Dem’s.
Got high-tech militia? We’ll need ’em. Are you male and 18-45 years old? You ARE the militia. Show up with gear and training, or just show up.
Females and older men invited, but not required.
Cheers.

Anyone ever consider that there actually is a vast, one-world government conspiracy that has as its sole goal to eliminate the middle class precisely because its current energy appetite truly would bring about sudden and chaotic collapse?
Perhaps a transition IS POSSIBLE if enough money can be taken out of the hands of the world’s middle class to cut energy use significantly…

So, the middle class has to be eliminated because it uses more energy? Then the third world has to be kept in poverty forever to prevent them from developing into an energy-consuming middle class?
This is reminiscent of the position of another CFN poster and I consider this position to be completely immoral, a “we got ours” but let’s stop them from getting theirs mentality.

I never said we will continue on as before, or we don’t have serious problems as a society. I’m sure you realize that ALL problems are resolved eventually, one way or the other. I just believe the ultimate solutions to our problems will not destroy our civilization, but rather may transform it, to the point that those living today would barely recognize it.
I feel for you if you are surrounded by people who refuse to see what is really going on around them. It is similar to my experience in Boston, which I suspect is similar everywhere in America.
You and I may disagree on what lies ahead for us, but at least, I think, we both know things will not remain the same much longer.

We have at least 47 years more. Peak oil is the point when the maximum rate at which oil is extracted reaches a peak because of technical and geological constraints, with global production going into decline from then on. After peak oil we will have many more decades of oil supplies, though not as many as before peak oil, depending upon the rate at which alternative sources can be brought online to replace dependency on oil.
The UK Government, along with many other governments, has believed that peak oil will not occur until well into the 21st Century, at least not until after 2030.
The International Energy Agency believes peak oil will come perhaps by 2020.
Let’s say peak oil does occur in 2020. That means we will have several decades on the downside of the bell curve … painful decades, yes, but peak oil does not mean no oil.
Peak oil will be a powerful motivator for change and will spur the development of alternative, sustainable sources of energy.Peak Oil is a GOOD THING.
In any event I am sticking by my figure of 47 more years of oil supplies based upon the estimates of many national governments, private industry sources, and energy monitoring agencies.

While one may agree that Obama was not the total solution to the mess left by 8 years of Dubya, it may be seen that we as a nation are responsible in our over consumption whether it is gas, oil, buying, status gas hog cars or our need for war to justify the means to the end. We need a total 360 degree change in our thinking. Kunstler’s books and this blog makes more sense than some of you may want to admit. It isn’t futile it is inevitable. There is no end to the suffering from herbicides and pesticides destroying our food, tainted vaccines, diseased animals used as food and pharmaceutical nightmares coming true. Who knows when or if things ever really change. I will keep hoping and keep reading his brilliant books.

Just have to wait and see. All the friggin BS with all these new funky terms that mean squat. What will be will be and your PhD will be worth no more or less than the utility of the diploma to clean someone’s butt.
PO things will not be nice. Not like some of those Hollywood based post apocalyptic soaps. Everyone sitting around in the local pub drinking a ever decreasing supply of JW crud.
Many will succumb as the infrastructure fails. The bigger the metro area the worse it will be. Watch out for those hungry seniors operating on their last charge of juice on their scooter store go chairs.
Society will be supplanted with survival and values will change. It should be interesting. Not pleasant but somehow this never ending growth mantra has to stop.
We are only consuming ourselves. If something drastic does not occur we are destined to banishment from this planet. Perhaps “Land of The Zombies” is not that far off.

In any event I am sticking by my figure of 47 more years of oil supplies
=================A note to TreeBeard: During the mid-afternoon today I recommended that you NOT make stock market predictions (prices, economic data, etc) unless they are very general if you don’t want to wind up looking foolish. I used to write a market timing letter so I know whereof I speak.
However, I failed to mention that it is OK to be very precise, just as Asoka is above, with no danger of appearing foolish, so long as the predicted event is so far out in time that no one currently reading the prediction will remember (or be alive) at that distant future time. What I’m saying, therefore, is that Asoka’s peak oil prediction is meaningless.
I predict the world will end Nov 13, 2231 at 3:47AM eastern standard time.

Oh and its its ‘word count’ not “work count”.
============
Dost, as I have learned on an occasion or two, it is extremely embarrassing to make an error while in the act of correcting someone else.
You have typed its twice and have failed to use an apostrophe (it’s).

47 years from now would be 2057, which will be the 100th anniversary of the space age (Sputnik).
If you are correct that we have enough oil to last until then, and if, during the next 47 years an external extinction event doesn’t occur, or we don’t blow ourselves to Hell and gone, or we don’t succumb to a natural or man-made pandemic, etc., etc., then at least one of Earth’s civilizations will survive, and at the current rate of scientific advancement (which should actually accelerate as time goes on), I would think we would have already resolved our peak oil problems by then.
And if you’re wrong, and we have, say, only 20 or 30 years of oil left, then if we haven’t yet resolved the “peak” problem, we should at least be well on the way.

You say: “Asoka’s peak oil prediction is meaningless.”
I’ve read your predilection for exactitude, but the world doesn’t necessarily work that way. For example, quantum mechanics describes the world as a probability function.
I think that Asoka means that we’re not running out of oil tomorrow, and that if TSHTF someday,(which he doesn’t believe), it won’t impact our lives for a long time.
Just because an exact figure may not be correct, a point can still be made, and hence such a prediction is not meaningless.
And a final comment: Many of this blog’s posters under 40 years of age may be alive in 47 years.

CORRECTION AND ADDENDUM:
But Orlov is just plain wrong on PEAK OIL.
Note to Qshtik: it seems you pulled your end of the world date out of your ass. My 47 year figure is based on an average of estimates of academic researchers, national governments, private industry oil professionals, international oil monitoring agencies, etc. AND I CITE MY SOURCES.
What is the source of your end of the world date? (other than your ass)

You said:
“Expect 70M dead by spring if the power goes out in October. That’s a fierce smell and bunch of rancid meat to contend with in the spring. Don’t worry, wild dog packs will get a taste for decaying human flesh, just like they did in Iraq, and have big litters of hungry puppies. Things have a way of working themselves out.”
My, my, such pessimism. I’m gonna go into my stash and OD. Who wants to go through this shit?
By the way, before I do myself in, could you please tell me where you got the info that the power grid is going in October? Or are you just theorizing in a most terrible way? Because if this is just a horror movie you’re foisting on us, and I find out afterward, my ghost is gonna be real pissed at you.

I think that Asoka means that we’re not running out of oil tomorrow, and that if TSHTF someday,(which he doesn’t believe), it won’t impact our lives for a long time.

Thank you. It will impact our lives in the short term… it is already with all the reports and articles being published about peak oil.
What I am saying is Peak Oil is a good thing. Like the joke about the mule getting a 2×4 whack in the head to get his attention: Peak Oil is the 2×4 to our heads that is getting our attention and causing us to focus on the issue.
Recognizing a problem, and understanding its dimensions and implications, is a necessary prerequisite to taking steps to solve it.

What part of these core values do you disagree with?
How can anyone disagree with such vague statements? They’re essentially meaningless unless we define our terms and give them some context. They’re slightly fleshed out bumper sticker slogans. Oh, and War and Peace is Tolstoy. Maybe you should try deviating from Mr. Beck’s reading list a bit.

“Out of respect for ProCon, who is tired of reading our exchanges about religion, I am going to refrain.”
Then also refrain from trying to implicate the scriptures in all of your rants, when it is ignorance of, or out right rejection of them and what we are taught [therein] about the causes and effects that we see playing out before us.
“My people are destroyed all the day long for lack of knowledge.”
“I am set for the defense of the gospel [good news].”

Then also refrain from trying to implicate the scriptures in all of your rants

This will be more difficult to do since I see those scriptures (whether the Bible, Quran, or Torah) and blind defense of them as the inerrant WORD OF GOD, to be at the root of many of our violent conflicts with other nations and with our destruction of the planet Earth itself.
But, out of respect for you, MD, I will try.

“I just see no point in DEFENDING it to someone who is not of your faith.”
If lies go unchallenged, folks will quit seeking truth, which is the only thing that will set us free.
“As iron sharpens iron, so does a friend, the countenance of his brother.”
He is both, he just doesn’t believe it, yet.
“He calls things that are not, as though they were.”
God has faith in us. An infinite amount more than we have in Him.

*The UK Government, along with many other governments, has believed that peak oil will not occur until well into the 21st Century, at least not until after 2030*
Are you really so sure about this fact now dear chap?
You really must get out and about more… off the beaten-track perhaps and breathe in some deep carbon neutral, green grass tinged air for a chance perhaps to blow those cobwebs away….or maybe what we have here is another case of happy-clappy Prozac pills being responsible for swallowing whole that ‘Emperor has no clothes’ syndrome?
Our maybe in fact I’m completely reading this all wrong, and I’m just not enough of a ‘believer’…
you know Lordy Lordy lets all get down on our knees and pray to Jesus, he’ll surely be our true saviour, now won’t he?
Once more its b#tchslap time folks (doh) this really is getting a tad repetitive… you know – me playing good cop/bad cop mom continually laying it down on the line to you naughty blogyard schoolboyz…
*sniggers*
When Richard talks mate ministers do actually listen…guardian.co.uk/business/2010/feb/07/branson-warns-peak-oil-close
Which lead to this development just a few weeks back…financeyard.com/peak-oil-alarm-revealed-by-secret-official-talks
Still so smug now are we, that we can all go globally fully peddle-to-the-metal? And here’s a wee thought – if the current UK govt with just 65m souls to worry about coercing is getting nervous now…. where would that leave you guyz over there in the US with 307m people to manage as we flip-flop down the ever collapsing easy-street fossil fuel stream?
Me thinks not baby (burn baby burn) hoo-rah!
But here’s what some Americans will for sure be invest in heavily for the fothcoming fun & games…circa 2015youtube.com/watch?v=4bA5JFrHRTU
Now sing with me!
‘Right-wing christian buckwheat soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before’ – what a fabulous combat colour combination – well it’s a god given right-n-all, and who could ever forget those delightful prophetic words
‘From my cold dead hands’
Be seeing you….

Perhaps I’m that CFNer you’re referring to.
If not, I’ll give my two cents anyway.
Here it is: Carbon retains heat; First World lifestyles use more carbon; therefore, First World lifestyles — regardless of race — expel more carbon than Third World lifestyles and contribute more to global warming.
Therefore, to save this damn planet that I — and, I sometimes suspect, you — love so much, we must do all we can to ensure, whether First or Third World, we all use less energy.
And if that means keeping 1-plus billion Chinese from adopting the misguided, outmoded American Dream of eating out at the fast-food chain every day and driving a new Hummer every two years, so be it.
Hell, I’m in the First World and I do all I can not be a part of that “I’ve got mine…” clique you speak of.
Say “yes” to the lovely Planet Earth. Say “no” to ugly American Consumerism spreading its dirty hands into every last “market” on this planet.

So I find myself agreeing half the time with Paul Krugman of the NY Times and disagreeing with him half the time.
But this old column of his I found has me never wanting to listen to a thing the guy says again. It’s from 2002. Here’s an excerpt:
“The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn’t a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.”
Holy shit! This guy is a fan of world-economy-destroying bubble fantasies.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip.html

One of the major drawbacks of most renewable energy sources is high cost. In order to see a huge rise in the use of renewable energy sources, prices must come down.
In the world of solar there have recently been some major breakthroughs in cost advantages and efficiency increases. Scientists at the University of Toronto in Canada have come up with a way to reduce colloidal quantum dot solar cell prices by up to 80%, by swapping out costly conductive gold for cheap nickel.
Quantum dot solar cells consist of a silicon substrate that has a thin film coating of nanocrystals — or quantum dots. Gold was previously used as the conductive material in the cells and when scientists tried to switch the gold out for nickel the nickel formed new particles with the quantum dots that weren’t able to capture energy.
Scientists at the University of Toronto led by Dr. Ratan Debnath found that increasing the layer of silicon substrate created a big enough barrier between the dots and the nickel that the solar cells became effective at the expected efficiency levels.
The team at University of Toronto published their findings in a paper in the July 12, 2010 issue of Applied Physics Letters and noted that with further research they believe that they will be able to increase the efficiency of their extremely inexpensive quantum dot solar panels and make them look attractive to consumers when they eventually hit the market. Unlike conventional solar panels, the quantum dot solar cells that the University of Toronto invented capture visible and infrared light.

The plain facts are that there isn’t really anything new to discuss. Most of the information surrounding population, economic growth, and the effects of Peak Oil on their status have been available for years and years.
The two sides of the “reality” are the status quo, who continue to enrich themselves, either remaining oblivious to the coming slide through distraction or wishful thinking and the thoughtful – the misaligned collective of nut-jobs and clear-headed individuals that realize the numbers aren’t going to work much longer.
The status quo are organized, generally wield all the meaningful power and will do anything and everything to dissuade or delay any reckoning of the coming reality. The collective of the thoughtful are disorganized, often myopic in approaching the scope of the issues and generally unable to form any coherent plan of action to refute the status quo or ability to describe any rational to change course or activities of any consequence.
Again, the single most vile and thoughtless use of petroleum is the use of a personal passenger vehicle for single passenger transportation.
If there are any authorities around by 2050 to write a history of the oil age they will surely write with damning self righteousness of how utterly ignorant the population of the Earth was between 1940 and 2040. By then the “auto” mobile-vehicle-age will be no more than a distant object in the rear view mirror of life.
Continue pointless banter below.

Good Lord. Another one of your “my gurus
are better scientists than your gurus” and
“my painstaking research is more accurate
than yours” and “quote me all YOUR numbers”
posts.
Who elected you emperor of this site, Asoka?
Besides the fact that you appear to have no
life outside of this site, you think that
we care about your weighing-in on every
damned topic from Peak Oil to religion to
your gurus’ estimates of … whatever.
How you come off is hilarious because you
are, at one and the same time, an “everyone
here is my brother” egalitarian and yet one
of the most consistently insulting bastards
on the site?
Which person are you? That’s the problem with
the Internet: You can have ten personalities,
none of which correlate with who you actually
are. You are a one-man study of everything
that makes the Internet more noise than signal.
E.

You Wrote
” Oh and its its ‘word count’ not “work count”.
Dost, as I have learned on an occasion or two, it is extremely embarrassing to make an error while in the act of correcting someone else.
You have typed its twice and have failed to use an apostrophe (it’s).”
Oops! It sure is embarrassing, thanks for pointing that out. I’ll be sure to double check my corrections in future. 🙂

Hmmm… That does seem to show production, but I’m not sure it reflects reserves(?)
Also (kinda funny), this particular chart comes out of Kuwait University, March 2010. ;o)
In regard to Mr. Orlov, the last paragraph is one of the most intriguing of the commentary.
(I’m with you as well about PO not being a “bad” thing, Earth-wise. Bound to be a little tough on those used to a big bunch of “energy slaves”.)

I just got done reading our daily fish wrap and noticed that not one but two of our downtown restaurants are closing. This saddens me because these were places I actually patronize and can walk to. One place was a fairly upscale restaurant. They opened the restaurant part of the business back in 2001. I guess the economy got ’em. On the plus side, they will keep the bakery side of the business open. The other place was a Chik-fil-a. I’m not exactly crying over it closing, but it was a fairly decent fast food joint. Great place to grab something quick while running errands downtown. Things are tough all over, I guess.

I have been reading James’ articles for quite some time. I am on board his collapse thesis, although I come from a slightly different perspective. I’m more concerned with the unsustainability of a fiat, debt-based currency system. I have slightly more faith in humanity’s ability to adapt and overcome dwindling fossil fuel supplies than I am in our ability to defy the law of mathmatics by trying to end a Depression brought on by borrowing with more borrowing. In the end, it is compounding interest that will be the problem, and I see the oil issue as another kick in the shins, right along with demographic issues.
But whatever. I get it. We’re screwed. I have no doubt about it.
Although, I am disturbed by the constant name calling and animosity dished out towards the tea party movement and anyone that isn’t some dogmatic liberal/progressive. It reminds me of situations you see all around the world where a certain super power will go and invade a third world country and, instead of the locals repelling the invader, they turn on each other in order to settle age old differences between one faction or another in society. It seems so primitive and short-sited. And then I read James’ missives and the comments here, and rarely can anyone refute arguments of people like myself without resorting to accusations of racism or words like “tea bagger” being thrown around. It’s petty and juvinile and entirely counter-productive. And its no different than some blood fued between some Sunni and some Shia faction. James, if you’d like to move beyond our current understanding of left-right dogma, then I invite you to be the first to do so. Lead, and perhaps, others will follow.
I am not a terribly big fan of Glenn Beck. I do not see him as some Messiah. Nor do I think he is some fantastic threat to Democracy. He’s a former shock jock that knows how get under everyone’s skin. Perhaps, just maybe, the left should apply its principle of inclusiveness and diversity to Mormons and those truly not like themselves. But what would be the point of that? Glenn Beck’s followers don’t blindly pull the (D) lever so you all will settle for name calling. I think someone above said it best, if I may paraphrase… the poster knows Beck is racist, although he never actually listens to anything he says because he’s not worth listening to. How does this poster know he’s racist? Because MSNBC, the same network that gave us WMDs in Iraq and “the recession is over” in 2007 told him so, I suppose. The same MSM that you all bash about “not getting it” is also the same MSM that gets decide who is the enemy of whom.
Brilliant.
Rather than try to engage the population of concerned citizens, everyone here, and on the left, seems hell-bent on villifying probably the only portion of society that seems to intuitively understand that something is profoundly wrong with our country. It is a very big wasted opportunity.
We’re running out of time, folks. I suggest you all find some schtick that extends beyond accusations of racism because, quite frankly, it is getting old and I’m not short anyone buys it anymore. At some point you have to admit our challenges such as that Social Security is a ponzi scheme. Passing a law to make a racket legal doesn’t change the fact that it is mathmatically unsustainable and the entire trust fund is based upon nothing other than the government’s ability to collect taxes on work that hasn’t been performed yet on people who haven’t been born yet. It is the type of arrangement that will work until it won’t. You can hold your breath and scream and accuse people like me of trying to force granny to eat cat food, but it will never change the fact that you can’t get something from nothing. At least not forever.
As a student of history and politics, and a long-time libertarian, it is truly a shame to see how much the progressive left and the alternative right have in common, yet are unable to communicate about it. But thanks to shills for the established parties like Mr. Kuntsler, it is assured that we shall never get to speak in a civil manner about the concerns we all have about our future. I hear how both parties are the problem. Then we’re supposed to vote Democrat. Anyone else see how odd this is?
If anyone would like to engage me in a conversation here, go for it — particularly as it relates to getting the alternative right and the progressive left to speak. But can we skip past these parts of the argument:
1) the part where you call me a tea bagger
2) the part where you call me racist, or say I am a product of white privilige
3) the part where you bash Ayn Rand
4) the part where you bash Ron Paul
5) the part where you bash sound money
6) the part where you get confused and I have to remind you that Lyndon LaRouche is a Democrat
Am I leaving anything out? Because, let’s face it, we know how these conversations go.
If you all recall, we spent the first half of the summer in a panic over race. The left spent the first half of the season trying to convince everyone that the Republican Party was looking to re-segregate lunch counters. The left has a button under the skin that the Democratic leadership and MSM know how and when to push to get ratings and votes.
And, when that was over, we had a panic about Sharia and the “Victory Mosque” in NYC because, just like the left, the right wing in America has its buttons as well. It was a controlled boxing match and you all participated in it and probably didn’t even know it. Its like some primitive tribe engaging in ritual combat. At least the primitive tribes know they are doing it just to do it. You all are doing it because you think you are winning. You are not. Incumbent politicians and the entrenched power structure you all detest are.
Meanwhile, we sink deeper into Depression. We’re told the war is over — as Americans are still getting killed in combat. And $trillions of wealth are siphoned from the productive classes to the richest 1% via bailouts and the institutionalization of crony capitalism. I won’t even go into things like Gitmo of torture. And all you fools can do is obsess over some bimbo from Alaska and froth at the mouth about “racist tea baggers”, which I remind you, you only know about because someone you already don’t trust told you so.
Now that I think about it, this nation is about to get what it deserves. Because if James or the people reading this are the most enlightened with regards to our future challenges, God help us. And God damn us.

An engineering student from BC just finished a coast to coast trip in an electric car (a converted 1972 VW Beetle). It cost $25,000 in donated parts plus $64 in electricity for the 6500 km trip. Each charge lasted 350 km.
Thing is this: how much energy is invested to produce this car? Assuming that overall energy consumed in production and operation of this car is less than normal gasoline powered cars maybe we have something here.
It may not have the speed or range of a gas powered car but, like my cousin says, when gas in 15 bucks a gallon or if the alternative is to walk for a couple hours pulling a grocery cart and 20 lbs of groceries in the snow and cold this vehicle won’t look so bad.
I have a feeling that future electric powered cars are going to be stripped of all comfort and safety features: no heat, canvas seats, 30 mph top speed (wind aided) to save on cost. Glorified golf carts in other words.
The question is will we have the energy resources, intellectual and technical wherewithal in our rapidly cretinizing societies to produce these things. It still would take highly advanced, energy intense industrial processes and deeply skilled people. Looking at what comes out of our school systems nowadays ie bank employees that have no idea how to calculate simple interest, I have my doubts.cbc.ca/canada/nova-scotia/story/2010/09/07/ns-electric-car-gu.html

IMO the root of human conflict isn’t religion. Religion is just the cover story (God wants us to kill the infidels) and it’s a good way to rile up the young men that are always the cannon fodder.
If you’re an ambitious rabble rouser make sure you have a large population of young, hungry, unemployed, unmarried, frustrated young men. Give them a cause, a flag, a uniform and three meals a day. They will walk ramrod straight and, as we’ve seen, straight into artillery and machine gun fire.
Almost always war is about power, land, resources and women. Who gets the biggest, most grandiose palace, the most power, the biggest harem. Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and killed a quarter of the population not out of religious motivation but out of greed. Same thing when Rome and Carthage butted heads.
What did the US Civil War, WW1, WW2, the Cold War have to do with religion? Ethnic affirmation? Maybe, but in the end it was about control of land and resources (lebensraum as Hitler put it.)

And a final comment: Many of this blog’s posters under 40 years of age may be alive in 47 years.
============
Bean, based on the things people say on this blog and the way they express themselves, it is my guess that the vast majority are over 40 years old. But I allowed for the possibility that some may be alive 47 years from now by saying they are likely to have forgotten Asoka’s prediction. My mother-in-law, who is 88, has already forgotten that yesterday was Tuesday.
If, as you suggest, Asoka was simply voicing a belief that there will be oil supplies for a long time to come why not just say that. The specific 47 years is nothing more than an unprovable and forgetable feel good number.
Asoka tries to give weight and heft to a mere belief by being precise.

One thing that is never considered when discussing automobiles is the horrendous amount of energy and resources that go into their manufacture. They are highly complex manufactured items with components that, collectively, require immense amounts of energy to create.
I heard once that it takes 10,000 litres of water to produce a single automobile. When I put that question to Ford at their Rouge Plant tour in Detroit that touts “green” is Ford’s middle name, I got a blank stare from the greeter. No susprise there.
Fuel (or lack there-of) is not the REAL problem (we have billions of barrels of oil left, not to mention all the “alternatives”)… it’s our insatiable need to get around quickly at the drop-of-a-hat in an as-inefficient-as-it-can-possibly-get mode (i.e. everyone has to have a large personal vehicle). This is the true culprit. Our entire “world” revolves around this principle.
I believe that electric (or hybrid or diesel or bio-fuel or french-fry-grease-running etc. etc.) cars are merely a bandaid and don’t address the real problem: that of the perceived “right” for every human to have universal accessibility to personal transportation on a 24/7 basis. This perception is being sold on a global scale.
I don’t care what the manufacturers come up with; billions of any vehicles sucking energy and/or spewing emissions on a limited resource planet ultimately isn’t going to work or last. There is nothing sustainable or “green” about any of these solutions.
And when you consider the damage to the planet as a direct result of hundreds of millions of personal vehicles, then the fact that a vehicle is more efficient or emits less CO2 is meaningless. Just look at satellite images over car-dominated built-up areas. It looks like a cancerous growth; because that’s fundamentally what it is to the planet. Just the physical footprint alone of our existence when coupled with personal automobiles is 5 times what it was pre-automobile age. You’d think the threat (and now reality) of climate change would be enough of a warning that we’d say enough is enough. Apparently not.
Selling any of these “green” or alternative fuel source vehicles is simply a smoke-screen. It is just a feel-good marketing scheme for people who think being “green” is recycling plastics from the tons of extraneous crap they buy to fill their over-bloated homes and two-car garages.
People just aren’t “getting it”, and allowing them to think that buying an electric, hybrid or diesel vehicle is doing the “right thing” is irresponsible.
Let’s face it, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize what the true motive of the automotive manufacturers is, especially when they advertise “Luxury Hybrid cars”. Not only is this an oxymoron, but it’s a reckless crock that we’re all going to pay for; unfortunately sooner than later.

Further to my rant and specfic to the article, Gu is quoted as saying:

“There’s countless RV parks and campgrounds where big RV trailers go in to plug in their power”

Have you seen the size of some of the trailers and RV buses on the roads these days? Holy fuck! If that isn’t a manifestation of hyper-excess I don’t know what is.
Ya, sure dude, thanks to your ingenuity, in the future everone’s gonna be pullin’ a big fucking 40′ trailer behind their electric truck and we’re all gonna be eatin’ steaks every night for dinner and haulin’ an electric Hummer H2 in behind for tootling around town picking up shit from WalMart. (Don’t they have RV plug-ins at WalMarts yet?)
Fuck me!

Hype vs. reality re China. This morning,
a Bloomberg TV ticker tape item said that
China is going to have selective blackouts
because they cannot meet the electricity
needs in the entire country all at once.
In other news about China, their aquifer
depletion is truly catastrophic (making
cement takes a LOT of water).
Trying to be an informed listener to news
these days is like trying to read between
the lines in Pravda or Izvestia back in
the Cold War Days. All you can do is guess.
E.

One thing that is never considered when discussing automobiles is the horrendous amount of energy and resources that go into their manufacture. – Enviro
Totally agree and nobody wants to know either. That way we can buy a hybrid and paint ourselves as holy and green while changing nothing subtantial about the way we live. We take symbolic action like recycling cans and bottles while happily driving our cars.
At a work lunch several years ago a bunch of us had a discussion about environnmentalism. One topic was how much we’re prepared to sacrifice for the environment. Someone made the point that cars were enormously destructive. A female co-worker with school age kids said that is well and good but her kids’ interests come first and she needed the minivan to get them to hockey practice. End of discussion. Mother bear bared her teeth.
Same with most of what we buy. One chap was a born and bred liberal with all the usual liberal attitudes. Deplored environmental degradation. But he lived in a three thousand square foot house on a huge lot. Never stopped to contemplate the fact that to build that house on that subdivision a forest had to be cut down. Or what had to be done to get that granite counter top. A family of four does not need three thousand square feet. Nor does it need an SUV the size of a WW2 light tank. He huffed that a small car wouldn’t cut it because the family are all so tall and needed leg room. They were all around 6 foot.
Whatever. We’re all hypocrites. Consider the technology we use when we go for hospital tests. Think of the industrial processes used to produce that cat scan machine or the devices to do laparascopic surgery. A surgeon saved my wife last year by removing a lethal growth using such devices. I’m a hypocrite too.

More about the Indian and Chinese “miracles”
on:eoearth.org/article/Aquifer_depletion
While one-fifth of American farming depends
on irrigated land, that figure is three-fifths
for India and four-fifths for China.
The linked article also shows what a complete
disaster the Middle East is in this respect.
In Yemen, they are drilling for water at depths
normally associated with the petroleum industry.
Let’s face it … those vast Middle Eastern
deserts never could sustain any kind of real
population at all and their oil wealth has
created a La-La Land kind of thinking.
So, while the USA is certainly in a “long
emergency”, there ARE fluids which are even
more important than oil and water is that
fluid. That’s why T. Boone Pickens has
turned his greedy little mind away from
oil to water.
E.

“Am I leaving anything out?”
1) the part where you call me a tea bagger
2) the part where you call me racist, or say I am a product of white privilige
3) the part where you bash Ayn Rand
4) the part where you bash Ron Paul
5) the part where you bash sound money
6) the part where you get confused and I have to remind you that Lyndon LaRouche is a Democrat
Thank You very much. The only thing I would add:
7) the part where you blame it on a man-made religion {belief system} that is in opposition to {by design} my man-made religion

Seems to me that the lessons of the 1970s have been forgotten. The Fed over inflated the money supply back then to help the US economy get over the huge increase in the price of oil. The thinking was that the US economy couldn’t handle high interest rates and high oil prices at the same time. It solved nothing. You got high inflation, high oil prices, high interest rates and high unemployment.
So you wonder about the rationale for over inflating the money supply in the past 10-15 years. Maybe it was to help the US get over economic difficulties presented by offshoring ie the US economy could not tolerate normal levels of interest rates at the same time as its productive capacity was being moved to China.
So the result of the over-creation of money supply was a sequence of economically destructive bubbles and busts.
Conclusion? Fucking with the money supply by trying to artificially lower interest rates is destructive. It solves nothing. Don’t do it.

CFN is not really about Asoka, is it?
Asoka is writing about CFN concerns like energy, population, war, religion, etc.
Asoka often provides cited references to peer-reviewed scientific literature to support his comments on CFN topics, but that is a strange reason to attack him.
You, E., can provide more signal and less noise by responding to the content of Asoka’s posts, instead of commenting on your subjective reaction to Asoka.
And, given the gravity of the problems we face, if you find Asoka is hilarious, is that a bad thing? Lighten up, old man.
Perhaps you have forgotten that form is emptiness and emptiness is form and the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.
SOURCE: Buddha”s Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra, (aka, Heart Sutra).

Totally agree and nobody wants to know either.
And therein lies the problem, and we can thank their ostrichism for bringing the whole house of cards down with them.
I don’t discuss my thoughts amongst friends or co-workers for the same reason. Too “heavy” a topic apparently. Vana, cue smile for the nice folks and let’s have our contestant spin that wheel one more time.
And agreed that this down-sizing, re-localizing, de-energizing, treading-lightly-on-the-earth initiative is a real challenge in our techno-dependant world. For me, undoing 40 or so years of indoctrination into a fairy tale doesn’t come easy. For example, we just built an “eco-house” that turned out to be a lot less “eco” than I had wished. We could have had all the bells and whistles, but not at the cost of a mortgage this late in life. Further, our concern was making sure we didn’t stray too far from “market” real estate and creating something what wouldn’t be sellable. All selfish needs. It’s a hard habit to break.
But the reality is that living more lightly is actually affordable, IF (and it’s a big IF) one is willing to forgoe the excessive square footage and big backyard and granite countertops and the 4 bathrooms and, and, and, and… but as you said it, they don’t want to know.

I suppose we could play dueling charts and graphs all day, but in the end, I’ll place my bets with “uncle” Orlov. Why? Because he has the least to gain in the Peak Everything argument. There’s the crux of the matter. Nobody remembers a Cassandra, once they’re in the midst of the mess predicted.
About the only thing in my life that I’m immutable about anymore is my intuition. I’ve learned [at long last] to trust it. I have more intuitive “faith” in what JHK and Orlov have to say than any BAU Pollyanna’s (or even techo-triumphalists [tm JHK]; as “unrealistically biased” as that may sound to some). It’s not that I’m anti-innovation; it’s just that I’ve noticed humans tend to use UP resources before they cast about for an alternative, GENERALLY. Sure, there are forward-looking exceptions, but the Lords of Commodification tend to quash these individuals if they possibly can (cuts into market-share, don’cha know). These GENERAL indicators do not bode well.

You bring up a lot of interesting points, Cash. But, rather than veer off into a discussion about monetary theory and fiat money, I just want to say, yes, having some cabal of bankers deciding the cost of money is ridiculous.
We don’t have a bunch of elites in the Kremlin deciding production schedules and quotas, but we do have a bunch of guys in suits deciding interest rates, and a number of other important matters relating to our medium of exchange. And, in principle, it differs little in effect.
We pride ourselves on this free market we have. Or, for the lefties, we criticize it. Either way, the consensus is that a free market exists in the USA. The fact of the matter is there can be no free market when we have the money system manipulated in the manner that it is.
And it is a d*mn shame the left can not see the connection between wars of empire and theft described as inflation. Instead of arguing about whether or not the top marginal tax rate should be 33% or 36%, there should be a focus on the practice of creating money out of thin or what it means that the largest holder of US Treasuries will soon be the Federal Reserve. But I guess having a serious discussion about our monetary system or the private cartel that controls it for its own benefit isn’t as nearly as interesting or as effective in elections as fomenting class warfare on a daily basis. If pushing the “racism button” doesn’t work, there’s always the envy button.
If only an economy could be fixed by turning people against each other….

T.H.,
Although I [usually] try to avoid engaging in left/right discussions, I will say this…
My prime enemies are ignorance and stupidity (even as I find them in myself). Those are most dangerous and life-threatening, IMHO. (Next would come “luck”, for good or ill, but there ain’t a lot can be done about that, eh? ;o)

Ah, CF Nation, how things stay the same. Even that little troll is back.
As I have mentioned in the past, we have left the US behind, and you would not believe how different things look when you are not looking out from the belly of the Beast, but are instead looking at Babylon from the outside. Only then can you see what a hideous, bloated, stinking corpse you were living in. Whew, the fresh air, water & food are so much better out here.
Its also interesting how irrelevant the US is becoming in the Outside world. It no longer makes things that other countries need, having abdicated its manufacturing base to China (except for the military), so most countries can now buy things that they once depended on the US for cheaper, and arguably better made, from China.
Oh, sure, there are some European countries that depend on US grain exports, but the rest of the world probably wouldn’t even notice if a black hole opened and swallowed the USA. China is even planing on not having to depend on the US Walmart market by opening markets all over the world for thier products, just in case the Black hole does open.
So, get over yourselves, the USA is history, or will soon be, and will soon not even matter to most of the rest of the world, except those countries you are dropping bombs on, but how much longer can the US afford to even do that?
Is that a great, big sucking sound I hear coming from up North?
Woooosh………

I’ll place my bets with “uncle” Orlov. Why? Because he has the least to gain in the Peak Everything argument. There’s the crux of the matter.

I guess I became aware of Orlov in 2005. He has been writing on “collapsonomics” now for five years with no collapse.
I’m just curious. If the USA manages to stay afloat another 15 years, will you then abandon Uncle Dmitry? 20 years? 25 years? 47 years?
How many years of predicting something, and not having it happen, have to pass before one reconsiders that perhaps the prediction was wrong?

lol. As long is it’s respectful. 🙂 I would like a bit more from a political movement than “cut spending, and bring us back to the founders view of the Constitution.” Especially when they have nothing to say when you ask what to cut, and they are unaware that the founders had as many fights about what the Constitution allows as we do. I’m open to listening to arguments, but not to Republican consultant created bumper sticker slogans.

And therein lies the problem, and we can thank their ostrichism for bringing the whole house of cards down with them.
I don’t discuss my thoughts amongst friends or co-workers for the same reason. Too “heavy” a topic apparently. Vana, cue smile for the nice folks and let’s have our contestant spin that wheel one more time.
And agreed that this down-sizing, re-localizing, de-energizing, treading-lightly-on-the-earth initiative is a real challenge in our techno-dependant world. For me, undoing 40 or so years of indoctrination into a fairy tale doesn’t come easy. For example, we just built an “eco-house” that turned out to be a lot less “eco” than I had wished. We could have had all the bells and whistles, but not at the cost of a mortgage this late in life. Further, our concern was making sure we didn’t stray too far from “market” real estate and creating something what wouldn’t be sellable. All selfish needs. It’s a hard habit to break.
But the reality is that living more lightly is actually affordable, IF (and it’s a big IF) one is willing to forgoe the excessive square footage and big backyard and granite countertops and the 4 bathrooms and, and, and, and… but as you said it, they don’t want to know.

If the fall out of when TSHTF really starts to rear it’s ugly head in the US, we up here in “quiet” Canada might just need our own wall (and a heavily reinforced military) to stop those desparate US souls who believe our resources are theirs simply because a) they “need” them, and b) they have the inanities of the NAFTA to force us to fork ’em over.
We might not end up being so polite.

Jefferson would have killed himself if he could have seen ahead to Dubya and B.O. In the case of B.O., he was seen as a romantic figure with the neccessary liberal credentials too. Thus he was able to fool enough white loons to seize the White House. He is not going to lead us out of this mess. Are we that naive as a country to expect otherwise?

Except that we’re not living so quietly. Our army is fighting in Afghanistan, has had hundreds of dead and wounded in that shithole, our cops keep picking up would-be Muslim terrorists in our major cities and sooner or later one of these terror plots will be missed and you will see on the news billows of smoke and dead bodies strewn about our streets.
But you have a point about the US military budget. The nukes are about as militarily effective and about as scary as a box of fireworks. If they were any kind of a deterent Ahmedinejad wouldn’t be sneering and laughing at the US every chance he gets. Same with N. Korea. Fact is that everyone knows the US does not have the stomach to use them. So get rid of them. They’re useless.
Other thing is that sooner or later the Butchers of Beijing will be wondering why they’re financing the Pentagon’s expenditures. You do not fund your adversary’s military. The Butchers are also going to realize, if they haven’t already, that the industrial half of the American military/industrial complex is on Chinese soil and effectively under Beijing’s control.
The butchers are holding all the cards. I can’t believe they don’t know this. They must already also know that the US T bills they own are so much worthless shit, hence their move to an economy that runs on Chinese domestic demand rather than exports to the bankrupt, broken down US.
Don’t worry Paddyp, the US military is going to get dismantled one way or another and I’m betting sooner rather than later.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The leader of a small Florida church that espouses anti-Islam philosophy said Wednesday he was determined to go through with his plan to burn copies of the Quran on Sept. 11, despite pressure from the White House, religious leaders and others to call it off.
Jones responded [to criticism] telling the AP “Instead of us backing down, maybe it’s time to stand up. Maybe it’s time to send a message to radical Islam that we will not tolerate their behavior.”

Since there has been so much talk against Sharia Law and anti-Islam and anti-mosque blather on CFN, I wonder if anyone is planning to participate in “International Burn-a-Quran Day.”
I am not going to be burning any holy books. Generally I am against burning books of any kind.

But that implies that you HOPE a leader, or leadership, will actually accomplish something — that is, support avenues of CHANGE in our energy consumption. Hope and change! I see leadership (at least in the U.S.) completely CRIPPLED by pandering to the Corpocracy. So I see CHANGE being thrust upon us rather than a country rising to meet the challenges presented by Peak Oil and Climate Change. Sadly.

Yes, Asoka, but does anyone (except for the few bloggers and commenters on sites like this) recognize the problem? I’m in Boston, too — and I don’t know anyone who even knows what Peak Oil is…except for one co-worker. Everyone else thinks I’m absolutely CRAZY when I even bring it up in conversation. The problem has to be RECOGNIZED before it can be ADDRESSED. I don’t see it happening. But time will tell…

mila59, don’t get sucked into the CFN despair vortex (TM). Peak Oil is not the end of the world. When Cuba lost access to Soviet oil, the country faced an immediate crisis — feeding the population — and an ongoing challenge: how to create a new low-energy society. Cuba transitioned from large, fossil-fuel intensive farming to small, less energy-intensive organic farm and urban gardens, and from a highly industrial society to a more sustainable one. They made a DVD about it: The Power of Community: How Cuba survived peak oil. Community Service, Inc., & Green Planet Films. (2006). Yellow Springs, Ohio: Community Service, Inc.
Also, please don’t think the problem is not being recognized. The military is all over it. Government agencies and international agencies are on it. Academia is doing lots of research into alternatives because they know peak oil is coming and we must change, though little has been done directly related to Peak Oil per se.
I know of 359 articles that have been written on Peak Oil, and 179 books on Peak Oil. There are 40 DVD’s and 5 VHS productions related to Peak Oil. There are at least 21 student theses and doctoral dissertations on Peak Oil.
All that research and writing is evidence that there are people who are concerned. As I said in an earlier post, recognizing the problem is a first step in solving it.
The general populace does not have to have knowledge about a problem for it to be solved. We got rural electrification because a minority were concerned enough, same with the atomic bomb. It is not necessary for a majority to have knowledge for change to happen.
The JHK reality distortion field, aka CFN, can be resisted with facts. As the years pass the dire predictions, like Orlov’s collapsonomics and JHK,s 4,000 Dow, will have less and less a grip on you.
Stay strong, mila59.

I wonder if anyone is planning to participate in “International Burn-a-Quran Day.”I am not going to be burning any holy books. Generally I am against burning books of any kind.
============
Yes, I am planning to participate but since I don’t own a Quran I will be burning my copy ofThe Bible of Option Strategies by Guy Cohen

You are unfortunately correct.
Well then. Given the evidence, it’s inevitable. We will collectively race off the edge of the cliff.
So this is why I keep on asking this question: Why are we (on this site) wasting our collective time and energy bemoaning the ills of society (politics, religion, race) when what we really NEED to be figuring out is, for the few of us who know it’s coming, how can we fasten our seatbelts and enable the airbag in time to (hopefully) survive the crash.
Here’s the conversation I keep on hearing on this running commentary:
Thelma: Oh, Louise, btw, I think that Obama fellow is a corporate apologist.
Louise: Well Thelma, everyone knows that Mexican immigrants are becomg a real problem. Did you know blacks are inferior?
Thelma: LOL! Those Wall Street guys are such cads! I’d like to spank their bottoms.
Louise: Did you ever notice that left wingers smell bad? Do you think he’s a Muslim?
Thelma: My stock trades are doing well, did I tell you? I’m really not fond of that mosque they’re tryi….SPLAT!!

Q. said: “Yes, I am planning to participate but since I don’t own a Quran I will be burning my copy of The Bible of Option Strategies by Guy Cohen”Will that be an effective way to achieve reconciliation with the Muslim world, in memory of 3,000 Americans being murdered on 9/11 by 19 guys with box cutters?
Cohen, G. (2005). The bible of options strategies: The definitive guide for practical trading strategies. Financial Times Prentice Hall books. Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Prentice Hall.

Life is change.
If you want the world to remain “as we know it,” I regret to inform you that is impossible.
What is possible is to remain agile and flexible and intelligent in the face of life’s changes.
The convergence of which you speak will be met in the exact same way: a multi-faceted synergistic response. We have nothing to fear but fear itself, as FDR said.

As for Obama: Remember what happened to Carter after he made a speech through national TV urging energy conservation? There were no takers. The lesson: Voters do not want someone telling them how bad they have been and need to make changes. Therefore, even if Obama knew better and become quite open about the nation’s problems, he will even get pummeled. (We are in 2010, not 1970’s — our bipartisan politics have degenerated since then!)
It takes two to tango together, including socio-economic changes. It would not make much of a difference even if there were an outstanding orator right now; lack of receptive audience.

Will that be an effective way to achieve reconciliation with the Muslim world, in memory of 3,000 Americans being murdered on 9/11 by 19 guys with box cutters?
=================
Don’t know what you’re talking about Asoka … I’m just trying to get a cheap laugh as the market grinds toward its 4PM close.
I say, let the Reverand have his book burning and let’s see if some Imam issues a Rusdie-style fatwa on him. Then we’ll know whose religion is crazier.

So, when the 99ers are told by Republican leaders that they are lazy and do not want to work. When those same leaders repeatedly oppose unemployment benefit extensions, does that mean the unemployed are not a “receptive audience,” they aren’t listening? Or will the orator’s words be heard by the unemployed?
Yes, as you say, “bipartisan politics have degenerated” … I just wonder if people might have a clue about who is always saying “no” and “hell no” to proposals for change and who is not offering any of their own proposals, aside from tax cuts for the rich that created the mess in the first place.
Perhaps you are underestimating the interest of the audience and its understanding of the situation.

Q. said: “I’m just trying to get a cheap laugh as the market grinds toward its 4PM close.”
Sorry to disturb you.
One billion members of “Islam” had nothing to do with 9/11. It was 19 Saudi Wahhabis that done it.

A… c’mon, I get “life is change” and that nothing stays the same. Life (of some sort, whether human or not) will likely live on despite our recklessness.
But quite frankly I couldn’t give a fuck about human beings, or even myself in the grand scheme of things. The ultimate crime that we are all guilty of is the destruction of non-human species. We’re turning a paradise into a shit hole. This is OUR paradise that everyone is fucking over, and no one seems to give a shit (except for a dismal few). The bulldozers aren’t lying idle in the Amazon and the tree-cutters aren’t moth-balled in BC. The ocean-bottom fish trawlers haven’t hung up their nets yet. We have the ablility to live in harmony with our environment but are willfully choosing not to. Greed has gripped the entire human species.
Perhaps this is a rhetorical question, and it’s all part of the Clusterfuck, but if one accepts we have driven off the cliff and are now in free-fall, then why debate? Have blog commentaries like this simply become the TV (i.e. effective distraction) for the intellectually adept while the air simply wooshes past our ears?

The cold hard fact is that on September 11th, 2001 we (Americans)lost and nothing bothers Americans more than being seen as losers. Get over it and face the real enemy, the rich and greedy bastards in our own country. Why burn books when you could burn lawyers.

Air swooshing past ears is enjoyable. The sudden stop at the bottom will be instantaneous death. We have to die someday. I guess I’m not seeing the problem.
As for the way we are treating the planet. C’mon, I get it. But extinction is a natural process. According to the fossil record, no species has yet proved immortal; as few as 2-4% of the species that have ever lived are believed to survive today.
The remainder of the species are extinct, the vast majority having disappeared long before the arrival of humans. So why so negative toward homo sapiens? It is what it is. It is reality. Always in flux.

cool…………
are yr colorado relatives now consulting with barak hussein?
‘The White House must be a strange place these days with the management of the USA turned over to astrologasters,… prayer-wheel spinners, and other visitors from occult realms unaffiliated with the dominion of reality’
according to a book called ‘ IDIOT PROOF ‘
jean houston was brought to the white house and
[ no shit ] encouraged madame hillary to
‘ channel ‘ ellie roosevelt!
also Q..when i use a” should i leave a space?

‘the alien has the right to remain in the US legally. ‘
no jack assoka I KNOW WHAT AN ANCHOR Baby
IS..I KNOW THE LAW..and today the LA Times had a piece by an adult anchor baby on anchor babies…shes now a prof at Brown!

Economy is improving. Misery Index shows a decline.
The Misery Index is calculated from the U6 broad unemployment statistic combined with seven statistical measures related to inflation and measures like percent changes in credit card delinquencies, housing prices, food stamp participation, and home equity loan deficiencies.
Misery is down from 33 in Feb/2010 to 24 now, indicating a positive direction for the economy with people suffering less.huff.to/bkexnU
I give thanks to Obama for this positive change.

So you also knew there is an annual cap of 4,000 on the number of illegal immigrants who can be granted Cancellation, and for the past several years the government has not reached that cap.
Big anchor baby scare: less than 4,000 per year.

“I’m open to listening to arguments, but not to Republican consultant created bumper sticker slogans.”
The Constitution is not a limit on what you and I can do, it is a limit on what the Government can do. It will not enforce itself, and we cannot expect them {party affiliation matters NOT} to do it.
We have been lied to, seriously:youtube.com/watch?v=dlfEdJNn15E

chinese dont have beef? do they? their topsoil is long gone, mao had them destroy trees and flies
[ both with disasterous consequences ]..
its not fer nothing red chinese are buying up the usa, africa, south america….and flooding the usa with their rich [ corrupt ] immigrants.
as a chinese student told me ‘ i never wanna work for chinese in the usa, they are horrible people!’

asia, in the USA people have a right to protest, even when their protest is distasteful or offensive.
People also have a right to build a house of worship to practice their religion on their private property.
I think the ACLU has already won these cases of free speech rights. The ACLU defends rights protected under the Constitution, even for Nazis.
We can’t pick and choose who is protected by the Constitution. The answer to hateful speech is for more people to speak up and counteract it rather than infringe this constitutional right.
I am consistent and pro-constitution in the case of the right to build a mosque, too.

Asoka — I wonder what sort of oration should be given to unemployed and unemployment-risky audience? If anything, austerity-ism has become the sermon of the year: National debt this, national debt that, and a whole slew of scaremongering. (However, this fear-mongering a complete crap: Under the fiat monetary system like the one we already have, a sovereign government cannot become insolvent unless they choose to do so.) To add insult to injury, there is not even a lowly fruit fly out there who can even preach a somewhat better tomorrow. If the current economic constipation evolves into an economic cholera, then the only kind of oration that will have mass appeal would be scapegoating someone and the target of resentment will not be directed at those who have contributed to today’s mess.
As for the ‘lack of receptive audience’ part: I am not too sure about this group — as a collective, they have not been that bright for quite some. I think the recent mayoral scandal at Bell, California, is a microcosm of our pitiful society: That mayor and his entourage have gotten away with so much looting, but they have not done anything illegal. Voter apathy made all that possible. In short, we are not likely to become vigilant unless our ass is on fire. But once things calm down, we will go back to our apathy.

Well, here is what the President said today in Cleveland and got big applause for saying it:
“I know that folks are worried about the future. I know there’s still a lot of hurt out here. And when times are tough, I know it can be tempting to give in to cynicism and fear and doubt and division -– and just settle our sights a little bit lower, settle for something a little bit less. But that’s not who we are, Ohio. Those are not the values that built this country.
We are here today because in the worst of times, the people who came before us brought out the best in America. Because our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents were willing to work and sacrifice for us. They were willing to take great risks, and face great hardship, and reach for a future that would give us the chance at a better life. They knew that this country is greater than the sum of its parts -– that America is not about the ambitions of any one individual, but the aspirations of an entire people, an entire nation. (Applause.)
That’s who we are. That is our legacy. And I’m convinced that if we’re willing to summon those values today, and if we’re willing to choose hope over fear, and choose the future over the past, and come together once more around the great project of national renewal, then we will restore our economy and rebuild our middle class and reclaim the American Dream for the next generation. (Applause.)”

Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme.
A Ponzi scheme is an investment scam, where people are urged to invest their money, and promised great riches in return. Like a 401K.
A Ponzi scheme attracts people by using new investors to pay dividends to the first investors, thereby providing a belief that the investment is sound. Unlike a 401K, in which people are told to invest, but not allowed to take dividends until they retire, without a major fine.
Social Security is a direct transfer of wealth from working people today to retirees, widows and orphans, and the disabled. It’s right there on your paycheck, separate from the federal income taxes you pay.
When Ronald Reagan lowered taxes on the wealthy in the 1980s, it didn’t magically balance the budget, the way he believed.
So they came up with a lie that there were too many people born in the 20 years after WW11 for future generations to directly transfer wealth to them.
So the lower paid workers (there is a cap on the wealth transfer, so that the wealthier don’t have to pay on all their income) were told that they had to pay double, in order to “prepay” their retirement.
The money went into a trust fund, which the government promptly spent, just like they spend the money that China and Japan and Saudi Arabia give them for US government bonds.
The only difference is that the US government doesn’t have the nerve to tell China and Japan and Saudi Arabia that they aren’t good for their debts.
But, to the incredibly stupid American people, they announce that since they spent that money, they don’t owe it!!
And the incredibly stupid American people say, OK, I guess we’ll just put more money into our 401Ks, because we have been told that Wall Street always rises.
And the incredibly stupid American people believe that even while they watch Wall Street go running to the US government to back them when Wall Street falls.
Wall Street trusts the US government to back them, but the American people don’t.
Meanwhile, the French riot because their government suggested raising their retirement age to 62 years.
The howlingly funny part of that is that Americans deride the French for being cowardly.

Qschtick, I am not here to look good. Folks are mostly anonymous. I don’t mind if they know who I am though. I am Geoffrey Harris and live in Sacramento, Ca. Am here to elicit reponses from people to improve my trading. Note that the Euro debt jitters passed today for a bit with folks buying into bonds issued by Poland and Portugal. Traders sold a bit when the beige book indicated that housing sales and building have slowed this summer and Obama is not going to renew Bush’s tax cuts to the very wealthy. I expect the markets to take a small dip tomorrow on the employment report, be flat on Friday and Monday, then dip a bit more over the next 2 weeks, which should provide an opening to buy back into Appl and Baidu. Am also looking for more worries about fiscal solvency to lead to gold buying so I can sell ABX at a higher price.
g

Actually, Americans reacted well to Carter’s speech, as judged by polls.
Now, after years of being told by the corporate media that “we” scoffed, even those of us still living lightly on the earth believe that Carter was trashed by Americans for that speech.
We are also told that “we” all loved Reagan.
We didn’t.

Especially when Reagan sent arms to Iran, even though Iran was under an official arms embargo.
When the public found out about Reagan’s illegal actions, his approval ratings saw “the largest single drop for any U.S. president in history”, from 67% to 46% in November 1986, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.
Not even a majority loved Reagan in Nov. 86.

Well, Well, Well……alive we are in this fierce debate. I would love to drive a hydrogen powered vehicle to drop the kid at school, and have mass transit here in Prescott, AZ still a beautiful place to live. But the tap water sucks, we have filters on every faucet and shower. The arsenic levels that occur from bad runoff is poisoning us all.I left California for an easier life on Disability. So far it’s much better. But the picture of this planet is scary beyond belief according to Kunstler we need to do a 360 now. No huge homes that suck our finances dry. No huge gas guzzlers and a unified belief that truth will out and survive the crap from people like GlennBeck, Limbaugh and intolerant homophobes.

“according to Kunstler we need to do a 360 now.”
I love doing 360’s because spinning reminds me of when I danced with Sufi dervishes. Poetry in motion.The wine of this fleeting world
caused your head to ache.
Finally you joined the tavern of Eternity.
Like an arrow, you sped from the bow
and went straight for the bull’s eye of bliss.

“The JHK reality distortion field, aka CFN, can be resisted with facts. As the years pass the dire predictions, like Orlov’s collapsonomics and JHK,s 4,000 Dow, will have less and less a grip on you.” -A.
Again, that’s your OPINION of what your set of facts reveals. No one can exactly know the future, but I’m still staking mine (what paltry bit there may be of it) on someone with sharp observational skills and firsthand knowledge of the stages of an actual collapse. BTW, the reason he’s talking about it is not to SCARE us (although we do need a good scare to get us going), but to PREPARE us.
…And we’re nowhere near as prepared as were the Soviets; this is what he’s trying to get across.
To answer a previous query about what time period of non-collapse would it take for me to “abandon” D.O.’s tenets and advise. That’s just kinda moot; his advise is practical in any instance, so what’s to “abandon”?
I could pose the “same” question to you:
“When will you abandon your Pollyanna-ish, rose-tinted, techno-triumphalist notions and start getting ready for some life-or-death challenges?”
See how easy? I’ll not parse this any further. If you are wont to, in advance I say, “you win”.
(It doesn’t in any way mean I’m in agreement, it just means you get the last word [for what that’s worth].)

“And since Detachments of English from Britain sent to America, will have their Places at Home so soon supply’d and increase so largely here; why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”
Anti-immigrant hysteria from Benjamin Franklin, 1751

The ignorance of the left, when it comes to economic issues, knows no bounds and has no doubt a lot to do with the public’s mistrust of Democrats on economic issues, despite the fact that empirically Republicans fare far worse in handling the public’s money.
Let me explain to you how things work, WAGELABORER.
You see, a 401(k) is a real investment plan with many benefits. You SAVE capital and INVEST capital, something very few people have any familiarity with anymore because we as a culture don’t any longer see a need to plan for the future because the gov’t can forever print money and borrow capital from Chinese peasants. And suckers like you think that will last forever.
Secondly, your employer matches a % of your savings. Yes, big bad evil corporate America does indeed give you FREE money. It is unencumbered, non-promisory and a store of value that requires no future promises, labor, or tax collection.
When you get that money, you are then given the choice (GASP!) of how you would like to allocate that capital. Then, corporations deploy this capital for, hopefully, productive purposes. These productive purposes involve the employment of labor and hopefully will result in surplus capital above and beyond the initial investment. If they fail to do this, they ideally fail when you re-allocate that capital to more productive endeavors.
On the other hand, Social Security is indeed a Ponzi scheme. You “invest” via a nearly 15% payroll tax split between you and your employer. That money is saved nowhere. It is immediately consumed by previous investors — just like a Ponzi scheme. The money that is not re-allocated to previous investors is “lent” to the US Treasury, which then issues non-tradable bonds. Yeah, they “coulda, shoulda, woulda” saved the money in a trust fund, but they didn’t, so get over it. What “shoulda” happened hasn’t and won’t so deal with it.
When demographics shift, as they are now, those bonds are then redeemed through one or a combination of three methods:
1) Increased taxes
2) Increased borrowing
3) Fed monetization (they print it)
… which is exactly what the trust fund was set up to avoid. But for the past 30 years any time some evil, top-hat wearing, mustache twirling conservative/libertarian such as myself brought attention to the fact that the entire arrangement is the largest accounting fraud in the history of mankind, we get castigated and accused of wanting to starve old people. Aside from the fact that you will receive several multiples of what you actually put into the entire scheme, and that the whole thing won’t at all work once this ticking demographic timebomb that baby-boomer aging explodes, you continue to have faith that a sufficiently large sector of the population, in a democratic system, will forever go along with supporting your idea of how a social safety net should work.
Yeah, people put up with a 15% transfer of wealth every day of the week, but will they do it when it needs to be 30% because peple like you are too damn dumb to know how t count? And if they do, how exactly do you intend for jobs ever to be created, given that the vast majority of job creation comes from small business that are, let me remind you, obligated to pay these taxes. But these questions are probably never asked by the ignorant such as yourself, because in your worldview, a nationalized GM run by cronies of whatever Presidential administraion in power is going to save us all with electric cars (that require coal burning plants) that cost $8,000 more than the Japanese models are all going to save us. Yeah, keep Hoping.
You must admit there is a certain irony at work here. Here I am, the evil lover of capitalism trying to explain to you how to save your ridiculous unworkable social contract, and the best you can do is completely and utterly confuse productive labor and friggin’ government sponsored fraud. Well, at least you having hit the “racism” button yet, but I’ll give it time.
I don’t know how old you are, or what your family situation is, but I hope people like you are prepared to figure out what the hell to do with your parents and your in-laws when expected SS payouts are 20% of what is promised because people like you were too damn ignorant, intolerant, and stubborn to admit that the entire basis of your precious little social safety net is nothing more than well-constructed fraud that existed on the back of a demographic statistical abberation that is quickly going to meet reality head-on.
I wish Peak Oil were the only problem we are facing.

That’s just kinda moot; his advise is practical in any instance, so what’s to “abandon”?

Anxiety, fear, cynicism, and anger relative to an imagined scary and unknown future.

I could pose the “same” question to you: “When will you abandon your Pollyanna-ish, rose-tinted, techno-triumphalist notions and start getting ready for some life-or-death challenges?”

When the facts dictate, i.e., when there is an actual collapse of the economy, an actual massive devaluation of the dollar, an actual closure of all banks, actual empty grocery store shelves, actual Peak Oil empty interstates, immobile vehicles with empty gas tanks, actual armed gangs looting neighborhoods, actual national blackout (loss of all electricity and internet), actual lack of energy for growing food, inability to feed an army, inability to fuel a military, etc. … i.e., when TSHTF actually happens. The things I have been reading about collapse since the 1970’s THAT ARE NOT HAPPENING.
My optimism is justified by the factual reality that none of those things are happening and my optimism will continue until there is a real (not CFN fantasy) situation that warrants abandoning my current view.

The Fabulous Fab gets off with a just a fine. I’ll bet the boys from Goldman are out tonight at Spark’s or Delfrisco’s. What a country. I’ll bet they are long live cattle futures and writing the whole thing off against their bonuses to boot.

I’m distressed about the Koran burning plans in Florida. That pastor has a right to do it, but I hate to think of the fallout all over the world.
You would think by now that the anomosity about 9/11 would have calmed down, but rude behavior to muslims in on the rise here in San Jose. For example, at my kid’s high school, there have always been young women who cover their heads with scarves. It was no big deal. My daughter was lab partners with a very nice girl from Africa who wore a scarf and modest dress.
But this year, there is a girl who is wearing a full length, black robe with only her eyes showing. She is being bullied. My daughter reports that lots of guys make catcalls and yell “terrorist” at her. Poor thing, being a teenager is hard under any circumstances. My heart goes out to her.
SJmom

The 401(k) with its fees and unrealistic guarantees is a flat-out lie designed to give the Lloyd Blankfeins of the world bigger bonuses on the backs of the middle class.
I say fuck Lloyd Blankfein, hard.
If one can assume that greedy-ass Wall Street is going to give up that middle class wealth it accumulated via the 401(k) scam, why can’t one assume that a modest, more-realistic retirement plan like Social Security will also pay out?
SS has money that should last decades — that is, unless the 401(k)-worshipping politicians spent it secretly on wars, bonuses for Wall Street and tax breaks for the rich.
Wait a minute. Is that why they wanted to us our SS money for 401(k)s? Hmmmm…

Oz asks Asoka: “When will you abandon your Pollyanna-ish, rose-tinted, techno-triumphalist notions and start getting ready for some life-or-death challenges?”
================
Asoka responds: when TS actually HTF. In this regard Asoka is a rather typical human – reactive rather than proactive. When TS has actually HTF it is, of course, too late.
To be fair, Asoka was proactive on a particular Earth Day some 40 years ago, give or take, when he had a vasectomy to save the earth from over population. (Alas, earth’s pop. has roughly doubled since then.) Everything since that feeble act has been totally Panglossian.
Many of us are waiting for Asoka to make good on his threat to move to Brazil and build an adobe hut and abandon the internet. That day cannot come too soon. Meanwhile we must endure the onslaught of inane posts that fly through cyberspace to CFN from Illinois (was it?).

Cows, somewhere around the end of 2001, my 401K became a 201K … i.e., it lost half its value … around the time of the Enron scandal. Never did recover its initial value. Private retirement fund growth… zero.

Q said: “Many of us are waiting for Asoka to make good on his threat to move to Brazil and build an adobe hut and abandon the internet.”
Are you confusing me with Welles, who is in Curitiba, Brazil? I don’t remember ever saying I intended to move to Brazil. I do remember saying something about South America, but that is a big place.
My posts are mostly erudite, polite, often documented, on-topic, and sometimes inspired.
Sorry if they are boring you, but Asoka has to continue posting, until he doesn’t (to paraphrase someone who said “big government works, until it doesn’t.”

I’ll bet they are long live cattle futures and writing the whole thing off against their bonuses to boot.
=============
Rox, the above sentence reminds me of an old Seinfeld episode where Cramer is contemptuously ranting to Jerry “it’s all a write off.” Jerry challenges him and says “what do you mean a write off?” Cramer gives a silent doofus look and Jerry says “you have no idea do you?” and Cramer says “no.” (Audience roars with laughter)
My point then is, if the boys from Goldman are out celebrating at Spark’s or Delfrisco’s how do they write the whole thing off against their bonuses? Please provide a detailed explanation.
And while we’re at it, how do you know it’s good to be long live cattle futures?
Rox, do you even know what the fuck you’re talking about?

Don’t Feel Sorry for Her Unless a Husband is Forcing Her But Most American Muslim Women Choose Their Dress Freely
============
What’s with all the uppercase letters? Is this intended as a newspaper headline?

I’m just curious. If the USA manages to stay afloat another 15 years, will you then abandon Uncle Dmitry? 20 years? 25 years? 47 years?
How many years of predicting something, and not having it happen, have to pass before one reconsiders that perhaps the prediction was wrong?” -Asoka
Surely this is intentional baiting. One of the biggest kicks I ever got in my whole life was when I heard about Christians making fun of the “cargo cults” of the Pacific islands for awaiting their supposedly-returning savior since way back in WWII.
Man, those Vanuatu islanders holding their breath for John Frum’s return are really gullible, aren’t they?? I mean, who in their right mind would wait more than, like, a decade for the second coming?
I’m still laughing…

Tripp said: “Surely this is intentional baiting.”
No, not at all. It was a legitimate question based on my waiting 40 years for TSTHTF … in vain.
After 40 years I gave up.
I really wanted to know Ozone’s take, but he refused to answer. Maybe, like you, he interpreted it as “baiting”?

Wha??
Beantown buckaroo pokes me in the ribs about a leave of absence with fuckstick on the loose and then we don’t hear from him in what? Couple of days?
I had some tings I had to take care of. Fuggedaboudit…

I support the right to build the mosque in Manhattan and I also support the right to burn the Kuran. Property rights and freedom of expression are sacred rights in a free society.
However, might I add that because I support the right to do something, doesn’t mean I have to personally like it, and I don’t LIKE the mosque being built so close to Ground Zero. I have the right to my opinions and to express them, too, and I have the right to display disrespect for a religion that brutalizes and dehumanizes the half of the human race to which I belong. I’m a woman, and I owe no respect to a creed that has no respect for me as a human being.
As for burning the Kuran, well, I think that’s great. But I would also throw the Holy Bible on the fire with it, along with the holy books of most of the world’s other traditional religions. Every positive contribution made by the world’s religions has been more than offset by their irrationality and brutality. As has often been said by other people, a bad person will be a bad person no matter what, but it takes religion to turn decent people into monsters.

“It was a legitimate question based on my waiting 40 years for TSTHTF”
Problem is, Asoka, you were too much of a visionary. Take me for instance. I didn’t have a fucking clue until January 2009. Up until then I though voting Democrat, recycling, and driving a hybrid would save the world!
You are large and contain multitudes, but I sure hope that at least one of your personalities is still working on down-teching and radical relocalization!

according to Kunstler we need to do a 360 now
================
Please copy and paste Kunstler’s exact words where he says “we need to do a 360 now.” Doing a 360 takes you right back where you started from. I doubt he said any such thing. The idea you tried to convey is pooly expressed and Asoka saying that he had fun doing 360s with whirling dervishes did not help at all.

“I have the right to my opinions and to express them, too, and I have the right to display disrespect for a religion that brutalizes and dehumanizes the half of the human race to which I belong. I’m a woman, and I owe no respect to a creed that has no respect for me as a human being.”
I saw a fantastic bumper sticker the other day that read:
“Feminism: the radical idea that women are human beings.”

“Take me for instance. I didn’t have a fucking clue until January 2009. Up until then I though[t] voting Democrat, recycling, and driving a hybrid would save the world!”
Let me clarify something though. Even with that creedo I didn’t waste my vote on the current Uncle Tom! God I wish I could hear my boy, Ralph Nader, utter those immortal words once more just for old time’s sake…

we’re having jive turkey for Thanksgiving at my house this year
==============
Really? Asoka’s traveling all the way down to Macon to join you for Thanksgiving? Do me a favor, let me know if he’s really black. Even money says no.

I don’t remember ever saying I intended to move to Brazil. I do remember saying something about South America, but that is a big place.
================
Correct. You said South America, near the equator. Most of the equator in South America is in Brazil so I took a stab and said Brazil.
It’s all bullshit anyway. You’re not moving to South America and you’re not building a mud hut and you’re not leaving the internet, much to the chagrin of many of us here at CFN.

Q. said in frustration: “It’s all bullshit anyway. You’re not moving to South America and you’re not building a mud hut and you’re not leaving the internet, much to the chagrin of many of us here at CFN.”
LOL!
Right, Q., and on top of it all, I’m not even Black. Just been jivin’ you crackers!

Jive: [Slang] Deceptive, nonsensical, or glib talk. One who speaks as though they know what they’re talking about…though they do not.
That about sums it up.
Asoka is a fake who is an impediment to dialog!
LOL!

“However, might I add that because I support the right to do something, doesn’t mean I have to personally like it, and I don’t LIKE the mosque being built so close to Ground Zero.”
I agree with you. I support the right in both cases, but make a distinction: one I like, the other I don’t.
The Cordoba House project is to bring together people in Manhattan in community-building activities. From increased understanding people might end up living together in peace.
Burning Qurans is a provocation and is divisive and puts our troops in danger. From inflamed emotions people may end up dead.

Unfortunately, getting a high survey rating did not help Carter much in the way of getting re-elected. (Although other events like the overthrow of the Shah, the rise of Khomeini, then the hostage taking of American embassy personnel in Tehran did not help.) Personally, I would not bet on survey numbers. Or, to put it in a different spin, those who were polled said one thing, then said something rather different with their votes!

My initial reaction when I heard about this story of burning Quran: What the bloody hell?!? If this sort of fooling around at someone else’s expense is a trend, then we may have to amend the 1st Amendment. There are many other ways of insulting and ridiculing Islam without wasting a drop of lighter fluid! Perhaps Guantánamo should be expanded to also take in idiots like Terry Jones (the instigator). After all, his kind of mentality resembles those of Islamic radicals we have become all familiar with!

Debit said: “My initial reaction when I heard about this story of burning Quran: What the bloody hell?!?”
When I first heard about it I thought: If Bin Laden needs an excuse to set off suitcase nukes in the USA, Terry Jones has just given Bin Laden what he needs.
Of course, if Bin Laden were to attack Ground Zero again that might take care of the mosque controversy, too. Bin Laden is not on good terms with the Sufi behind the mosque project.
Islam is not monolithic, though such nuances probably escape Terry Jones. I hope they don’t escape Laura, given her blanket condemnation of Islam re: women.

Finally, Asoka, in claiming to be totally
jive, has printed perhaps the first totally
TRUE thing on CFN.
Only his lists of “facts” are to be regarded
as such. Moreover, hasn’t anyone noticed
the dearth of ANALYSIS of the facts inherent
in his posts?? He just tries to bamboozle
by going to one website and overwhelming
you with a list, for example, of Obama’s
accomplishments and then glosses over the
fact that FOUR percent of TARP money has
actually been spent on started infrastructure
projects while $247 billion has been UNSPENT.
Obama is a TOOL and even many of the very
liberal posters here, and JHK himself, have
finally arrived at the correct conclusion
about this Corporate Centrist masquerading
as FDR. I will say this for the Tea Party
people … they might not be my party but
at least they’re organizing to attempt to
rescue the US from the feckless two-party
system which is really a ONE-party system
where people merely get different PAC money.
Asoka … get a freaking life, dude …
whatever ethnicity you are. Is it your
life’s goal to die while typing here on CFN
because your greatest love is getting under
people’s skin.
I prefer the far left and the far right on this
site to you because they are NOT jive. And
just because you can put a Sanskrit half-sentence
in a post doesn’t make you Buddhist, Hindu,
or anything else. You an obscurantist.
Nietzsche warned us about your ilk:
“The masses think that obscurity is profound
in the same way that a man thinks a muddy pool
is deep merely because he cannot see the bottom”.
E.

Asoka … get a freaking life, dude …whatever ethnicity you are. Is it your
life’s goal to die while typing here on CFN

Why do you care, E.?
Your ad hominem is getting tiresome. Surely you have better things to do than wonder about why I post here.
I have a great fan base on CFN of people who truly appreciate my informative posts and my unique perspective on issues.
To respond to your one substantive comment:

then glosses over the
fact that FOUR percent of TARP money has
actually been spent on started infrastructure
projects while $247 billion has been UNSPENT.

Obama’s agenda is an eight year program, not a two-month drive-by temporary government jobs program.
The dude is out to create a permanent, private-sector revving up of the economy, to have manufacturing here again, to provide businesses with 100% tax write-offs for capital investment.
He is playing chess, not checkers. He has a long-term vision and is not just out to get votes to get re-elected.

E., an obscurantist is a person who is deliberately vague.
I would wager that I provide more statistics, numbers, graphs, etc. from more sources, many peer-reviewed, and more analysis of that data, and more citation to my sources than anyone else on CFN who is offering their opinions with no substantive support and no documentation other than the occasional reference to Wikipedia (which is not a scholarly source, which even Wikipedia itself acknowledges).
Your obscurantist charge is bogus.

The TARP monies to start his pick and shovel
projects happened under the BUSH administration.
What’s with the 20 month delay? You should be
Obama’s press secretary because you’ve got an
excuse for every single omission and commission
under his watch.
He is PRECISELY about vote-getting. That’s why
he proposed a $50 billion infrastructure bill
that MAKES NO SENSE. When there is $247 billion
of existing TARP monies lying fallow what is the
point of NEW LEGISLATION?? The point is to get
his cronies elected in November.
As for my ad hominems they’re going to continue
because I don’t like your argumentative
strategies and I don’t like your “Obama for
America” worship. It has all the objectivity
of a pom-pom girl at a football game.
E.

Palin is a member of the “millionaire
punditocracy” … a wonderful term
thought up by Bob Sommerby.
Palin is about Palin’s bank account.
She was known mainly for treating the
workers under her in Alaska with
condescension and contempt.
I hate to rain on the Tea Partiers parade
but they’re hitching their wagons to the
wrong stars. If you’ve ever known any
aides or politicos who worked in the
Beltway, you’d know that many “enemies”
(like, say, Palin and Joe Biden) happily
clink glasses at Washington galas before
they go back to being fake enemies and
fake supporters of working people.
By the way, Tea Partiers … Obama’s idea
to repeal the Bush tax cuts FOR THE RICH
is a sensational idea. Reagan’s trickle
down economics was, is, and always will
be a joke. That’s why a REPUBLICAN,
David Stockman, wrote an essay about how
the Republicans destroyed the economy.
Reagan started the multi hundred billion
federal deficits. No man “deserves” to
keep, say, $50 million for ONE year’s
compensation. Soak the rich. After all,
they’ve been soaking YOU since this
Republic started and now we’re on the
brink of being a Banana Republic with
no discernible middle class.
E.

Tsk, tsk, tsk!!! Answer the CHARGE …
why did Obama ask for a $50 billion
infrastructure package when $247 of
TARP money lies fallow that was to
be used for said projects??
I don’t inundate people with lists and
imply that it’s wisdom. I list a few
pertinent FACTS and do analysis. You
confuse factoids with knowledge and
statistics for wisdom.
And I know the damned difference junior
because I *am* a statistician.
E.

Let me see if I understand your question.
You want to know why President Obama announced a new $50 billion infrastructure spending plan instead of using TARP funds?
Duh? TARP was originally designed to help financial institutions by buying toxic assets. Over $247 billion has been invested in over 700 banks of all sizes, earning the Treasury billions in interest and dividends on the investment.
Moreover, many banks have fully exited the CPP program, with the Treasury receiving additional billions from warrant repurchases and auctions.
Over 75% of the $247 billion had been repaid in June 2010. Probably more by now. When dividends, interest, and warrants sold are added to repayments, the total repayment far exceeds the original TARP amount. In other words, it was a success which did not cost the taxpayers and has actually lowered the deficit.
If you want to do something like rebuilding infrastructure (roads, rails, and runways), you have to find the money elsewhere, and even then you have to overcome the Republican penchant to say “no” to everything.

I agree with you, Bill, that we shouldn’t
be deterred by TV alarmists or CFN alarmists
from coming up with “solutions” but I don’t
see one in your own post.
Though Asoka mocks the attitude of CFN’ers
against “techno-truimphalism”, it IS a valid
critique. You can’t just say that science
always wins and “just in time”.
Indeed, science is a real mixed bag since
the 1950s. The H-bomb hasn’t really done
much except waste great minds in the service
of screwball defense contractors. Much of
agricultural gene splicing is the height of
hubris and produces Frankenfoods. Even
computer technology is causing a lot of kids
to get fat and anti-social via gaming and
excessive fatuous “relationships” over the
Internet. Computers waste about as much
time as they save. Old folks who never
learned to use them always seem to have
more time to BE while tech hipsters are
always too “busy”.
Personally, I believe that a revolutionary
sea change is needed in INDIVIDUAL psychology.
For example, why do people “need” 5000 square
foot houses, Hummers, and “shop ’til you drop”
mindsets? If people simply drove less, spent
less, ate less, ate better, and ascribed to
“small is beautiful” this website would cease
to exist!!! If these things started in 1970,
this website would never have come into existence.
Asoka’s protestations notwithstanding, solar,
wind, and many other altfuels have been tried
in Europe on a large scale and Spain, in
particular, has found that the MAINTENANCE
of wind turbines costs between 2X and 3X the
cost (read RESOURCES TOO) of maintaining
ordinary fossil fuel based technologies.
As JHK avers, the creation of the components
for wind and solar are accomplished on the
back of the existing fossil fuel system.
Moreover, if you canvas the opinions of
altfuels experts even the wild-eyed optimists
give dates like 2040 or 2050 for accomplishable
mass conversion to altfuels IF (a BIG “if”)
we don’t run out of the fossil fuels to make
them first.
But enough of conjecture. It’s a FACT that
if we all drove, say, 6000 miles a year in
vehicles getting 30+ mpg, we wouldn’t be
talking about tapping out in 10-20 years.
Finally, even “green activists” like Stewart
Brand acknowledge that NUCLEAR is likely to
be a necessary stopgap to keep power coming
while we’re waiting for better (and less
TOXIC) solar batteries and breakthroughs
that will enhance scalability of solar.
So there’s my solution. Everybody consume
less and let’s start building those pebble
bed reactors. My solution doesn’t rely on
any kind of HOPE about scientific breakthroughs
because it’s accomplishable with a change in
human psychology and the building of new
nuclear power plants.
Don’t let Asoka paint the CFN website as a
bunch of gloomy Guses with no ideas. The
people here are plenty smart and many are
already living the kind of lifestyle that
would lead to a MUCH slower erosion of the
sustainability of our lifestyle.
Asoka is a shit disturber who just likes to
bait with cheap provocateurism … often
involving his “spirituality” and other
ways in which he is “superior” to us mere
mortals.
E.

Wrong again, dimwit!! After the many of
the TARP funds were REPAID, Obama designated
them as the start of a fund out of which
the pick and shovel projects would be
funded. Indeed, repaid TARP funds have
been mentioned by many members of Mr. Obama’s
staff for a variety of purpose, not least of
which is AID TO STATE GOVERNMENTS.
Cheesis K. Reist, man, for a guy who has all
the answers you sure are an ILL-INFORMED
DUMMIE. He’s YOUR alltime favorite dude
but apparently I’m more aware of what’s
happening with the management of TARP funds
than you are. You actually think that
because you know what the ACRONYM STANDS
FOR THAT YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON.
The real “duh” here is that you actually
thought I didn’t even know what TARP was
originally for. Well, I not only know
what it was for, I know how much has been
repaid, how the repayments are being segued
to other projects, and how much of the money
is just lying around doing nothing!
Aren’t you even aware that around $10 billion
of repaid TARP funds are being used right NOW
to save schools in various states?? In fact,
I just have to ask … what in hell DO you
know??
You’re such a fucking cheerleader for Obama
and you don’t have a clue about the details
whether they make him look good, bad, or ugly.
E.

Every now and then I have to indulge my bad habits just so I can remember why it is I’m letting go of them. Here’s what a 6-pack of Sweetwater Brewery’s 420 Ale leaves you with:
A low-grade headache
Indigestion
Dehydration
Dry lips/mouth
Compromised oxygen exchange capacity
Low-quality sleep
Irritability
Heavy, bulky material to drive to the recycling center
And late night chats with Qshtik!
I picked up a quarterly magazine yesterday at Lowe’s called “Urban Farmer.” Wow! Right here in the West’s most conservative burg. Decent rag, I might subscribe, but there was an article about the wave of popularity in home brewing and vinting, and I think that’s great. Whether it’s energetically appropriate or not, it contributes greatly to diversity and local flavor. (And community building!)
But I just have to ask, where are people going to get the malts, hops, juices, and yeasts to make this stuff after the system crashes?
I’m telling you guys, the world is wide open for local entrepreneurs right now. Anything you enjoy, from anywhere in the world, can probably be done on a local scale. Within reason. “Parmasan” cheese made in Tulsa is not going to be the same as Parmagiano-Reggiano, but it’ll probably do in a pinch.
Love potato chips? Make your own! And make extra to sell at the farmers’ market. Before you know it they’ll be calling you Mr. Frito-Lay.
We just have to get beyond this idea that everyone can be rich. That was an usual facet of the industrial age, and I don’t think it will be applicable to the future. Hyperinflation, being the great equalizer that it is, will most definitely reselect for different, more down-to-earth skill sets. Make sure you don’t get left out;)

We need to contact our various city councils
where we live to stop landlords from letting
loss-leader chain stores from killing family
businesses. In Palo Alto, CA, almost everything
is now a chain store. A mere fifteen years
ago, chains were small in number.
I agree with your ideas about local business
but first we have to stamp out the cancer of
“something for nothing” as exemplified by the
landlord mentality. Every dollar of usury by
a landlord, represents a price hike to the
consumer or, if it’s a residential landlord,
a dollar that CANNOT be spent on local
businesses because it’s being spent to keep
a roof over your head.
We need a change of ETHOS to go along with
a change in our way of doing business.
E.

Surely the ethos will evolve incrementally, organically, as our energetic situation changes, but I agree that it’s a long row to hoe, getting back to that ideal, from where we now stand. Especially in a place like Macon, GA.
The most frustrating part to me is watching the local businesses die right before we need them the most. I only went to Lowe’s because I couldn’t find what I needed at any of the small shops, and it felt really dirty to me. I sure wish it felt dirty to more people! We’re going to need those mom and pop hardware stores once the economy of scale no longer supports the Home Depots and WalMarts.
You’re up awfully early…

Sorry about your run-in with crap spirits. They do abound! ;o)
“But I just have to ask, where are people going to get the malts, hops, juices, and yeasts to make this stuff after the system crashes?
I’m telling you guys, the world is wide open for local entrepreneurs right now. Anything you enjoy, from anywhere in the world, can probably be done on a local scale. Within reason.” -Youse (Tripp)
Yes, it’s important that you point out resource availability. (Just like a garden, eh? Any needed resource that’s in short supply defines the limits of plant production, no matter if others happen to be ample.)
That’s why I’ve been concentrating on wine. I just bottled the first 5 gallons, out of the eventual 20 (representing 48 lbs. of blackberries). I have blackberries in huge supply that I only have to share with bears and birds, and very good well water. (I’m really going to have to think fast about easy access to that water, in any case.)
The thing that’s not local is sugar. Blackberries generally don’t have a high sugar content, so to make a decent wine, it requires importation. It used to be done before the advent of the petroleum miracle; I wonder how that might shake out in some distant future.
Beer making? Haven’t studied on that much, although hops and barley can be grown here, and many “wild” yeasts can be gleaned from the natural environment. BTW, how IS malt syrup extracted? Sounds like more bigtime work (not to mention equipment)! Even my experience with making it from kits has proved it a bit touchier than wine. Wine (and perhaps some resulting brandy) might make a desirable trade item if it turns out well. I’ll keep practicing… ;o)

On being self-sufficient in Brazil..
Stayed at a chakara (gentleman’s farmish) for two days, just a few-acre piece of land up in the jungly hills. Owner just plants a few hundred rapid growing palm trees, sugar cane, has a large chicken coop, banana trees etc….he sells the eggs for $2.30 a dozen, the palms fetch about $3 come harvest time in a year or two (he said he’s actually going to plant several thousand), he sells the bananas too, and the sugar cane — 12ft tall — fetches $1.25 per stalk.
In this weather, everything just grows with no effort.
Interestingly, the palms are sold as live trees, or cut open and the white inner, pineapple-like substance is used as a food, called palmita.
Love the self-sustainability, I’m gunning to do the same thing. The owner introduced me to a neighbor’s ‘small’ 15,000sq. ft. chakara, guy’s asking $20k for it, has a 3-bedroom house on it, banana trees.
I’m looking for something 3x larger.
Electricitywise, just your regular $20/mo bill, feel free to string up a wire or two. No heat in the house (yep it can get cold, around high 40ish at times).
We chopped down a sugar cane stalk, skinned it and ran it though a hand-cranked press, the cane produced a pitcher of naturally sweet juice, not something you’d wanna drink too often. But you can sell the cane in town.
Little four-burner gas stove inside, totally sufficient for cooking for all 8 of us. Amazing how Americans are deceived into thinking they need Big Things.
Annual property tax of $200 or so, the owner told me.
Everyone needs to revert to Local, Small, keep money circulating among your neighbors, your townspeople.
On the way back to Curitiba, a city of 2-3 mill, we stopped and bought some pamona, which is a thick brick of corn paste wrapped in the husk, for $1.50 each.
Drove up through some low mountains on cobblestone road, lots of fog, the jungle on either side of us, bromeliads growing on the branches of host trees, huge 10ft banana tree leaves hanging everywhere.
Temperature fell to 50 in the cool inner jungle mountain area, but once we exited the skies warmed and suddenly shot to 75 degrees.

Extinction and emergence of life forms on this planet seems to be a given.
My annoyance is that we are the direct cause of mass species extinction and we’re managing to do it in an historically brief time period. Further, we are aware that it is happening and yet don’t care enough to stop it, illustrating our complete detachment from our environment.
As living organisms that shares this planet with millions of other organisms, I find our behaviour reprehensible. Concluding that “it is what it is” is an evasion of our responsibilities.

Sounds good; go fer it! (I does love me some hearts of palm.)
…And speaking of locally self-sufficient potables: somebody mix me up a Caipirinha! How much more “available” can you get? Distilled sugar cane juice, sugar, limes, and perhaps [hard-to-come-by] ice. (Careful though, a sugar hangover of MASSIVE proportions could be in the offing, as Welles can surely attest.) About 3 or 4 small ones is more than plenty… to which I can attest. Holy shit; don’t stand up too quick; damn!

P.S.
What do they do with the remainder of the palm after extracting the core? (Just curious; seems like a lot of leftover bulk for such a small piece of edible “insides”.)
Okay, enough bandwidth waste from me. I is gone fer now.

LOL! Unlike the inflection typically used with that expression these days, i.e. more like a command, I used it in the British way, more like an exasperated “Good God” with a rolling of the eyes.
But thanks for the stats. I won’t hold them against you. 😉

More about TARP: Check out Tim Cavanaugh’s article “TARP Profit: The Lies Get Bigger and Bigger”, Sept. ’09.
It really is incredulous to me to see the adoration much of the public holds for Obama, Our Chief Savior in Command. Harkens back to the days when high school girls would swoon over Frank Sinatra, Elvis, and the Beatles. Obama is just a carmelized version of another of our would-be great saviors, John Edwards. My how the girls did swoon! The only way to pry the mirror out of that man’s hands was with a large crowbar. What a proud export North Carolina provided to our country,- outside of tobacco, anyway.
To be fair, the big “O” is merely a place holder in the grand scheme of things. And no, I do not (and have never) subscribe to conspiracy theories. Obama is just warming the seat while the rest of the PTB finish emptying the treasuries. They will continue to plunder while the rest of us recycle our beer cans and ponder what color pail goes best in our homes to collect the rain water leaking from the roof.

…not sure what’s done with the rest of the palm tree, I think the palm heart part is more than 3ft long though, and from the looks of the trees ready for harvest, they look to be about 15ft tall.
i’m sure someone makes palm logs out of them, you see them propping up roofs all over the place.
yes Caipirinha’s are a nasty combo of grain alcohol (or vodka), lots of sugar and a bunch of crushed lime slices, enough to knock a bull elephant off its rocker.
the word Caipirinha means, i think, something akin to a ‘Country Bumpkin Juice’.
Presidential elections coming up soon. Voting is mandatory, you’re locked out of gov’t benefits or something like that, if you don’t vote.
Reporters freely walk up to the President and ask questions, severly unlike the bumpkin in the oval office. refreshing.
caveat- everything’s not glittery gold down here.

I designed a totally off grid house for friends of mine. They have a relatively small solar panel and that’s it. The house is highly insulated (but not super insulated) and takes advantage of passive solar energy. They have a fridge, stove, washer/dryer and dishwasher like most and the house is about 2200 sq.ft. of finished space including the partially finished basement. They use their electricity judiciously and they survive quite well. I’d say thrive.
The house didn’t cost a fortune and could be replicated on a suburban site. If all households were to adjust their living/lifestyles accordingly and install solar panels, collectively they would displace a massive amount of energy that wouldn’t need to be provided by nuclear, and/or other megapower-projects. I agree with E. We have the ability and technologies already, we just need an attitude change.
Unfortunately, even the GoM disaster wasn’t enough for people to switch gears. A huge spike in oil prices might do the trick, but would inflate the cost of everything else as well. The smart people are making the changes now while the costs are still relatively low. Smart governments are encouraging this (at least here.) Our Provincial government realizes that small scale power production is part of the answer to the future’s energy crisis. If only our neanderathal Federal government would realize this as well.

Every dollar of usury by a landlord, represents a price hike to the
consumer
=============
E, here is the definition of usury:Usury – the lending or practice of lending money at an exorbitant interest.
How do you connect usury with the activity of landlords?

Ssssure everything down there’s not made of gold. Just like Portland’s not full of hippies;)
I get jealous of you tropical types sometimes – you and Dee – but then I remember that I really like cherries and blueberries! (And don’t much care for dengue fever!) The lime and cane lightning I think I could do without too.
But from a sustainability angle? The tropics have it going on. Most of the world’s improved perennial vegetables are tropical, and no-till perennials are WAAAAYYY lower impact/energy than annual crops that we grow here. Some really interesting permaculture going on in the tropics too. Check this guy out if you’re interested:mmrfbz.org/Welcome_to_Maya_Mountain_Research_Farm.html
I think you’re doing good things.
Tripp

Yes Tiny Houses could also make home ownership drastically more affordable.
There’s a massive downsizing market in the US, as folks clump together with kids moving back in with parents, etc.
Here in Brazil, I’ve switched from my 1800sq ft house in the US to an apartment of roughly 500sq ft, use the clothes line, cheap propane stove, point-of-use heating for the shower (water heated at shower head).
Total monthly cost for cooking gas must be just shy of $2 (cooking for 2 people once-twice per day).
Dudes and dudesses, when it gets cold we just throw an extra quilt on the bed. I hear Abe Lincoln slept in the same bed with another man for years in a boarding house. Think it was a matter of staying warm as much as frugality.
We can all relegate JHK’s peak oil apocalypse visions to the Fantasy Section of TV Guide, folks are already slowly retooling their consumption, adjusting downwards.
Sudden MadMax anarchy doesn’t happen – Katrina will not happen on a nationwide scale. Until it does, lol.
Can’t wait though for some country hick to rescue Kunstler’s sorry sack when his AIR CONDITIONED car gets tornado’d off the road as he rides through Arkansas & smugly jots down another of his SAT Vocabulary words attempting to denigrate anyone who didn’t lick Obama’s fake-veneered behind, and who might indulge in Cheez Doodles with intermittency.
This week’s Kunstler Kwality Grade: 9 out of 11 (see Spinal Tap for explanation).

O3! The blackberry wine sounds delish! Any chance you could make it with honey or maple sugar as a sucrose substitute? Maybe at least when the shit goes down it would be palatable enough that way?
I’m going to have to find something to trade you for some of that vino! The cash crops we’re developing here are oyster and shiitake mushrooms to come online first, blackberries next, then tea, then figs. Any of those 3 (blackberries are obviously worthless to you) sound tradable long distance (for now)?
Keep on doin yo thang, bra.

Dude, point of use water heater for your shower? I’m all ears. That’s about the only thing I need hot water for anyway. And that would give us another closet in our little house too (1000 s.f. for 4 people).
Tripp out.

Yep, we have two small Cold Water taps, one in the very very small kitchen, another in the extreeeeeeeemely small bathroom lol. words FINE people, you don’t know what yer missin’. makes the hot water all that much more enjoyable.
Re point-of-use hot water, here’s the scoop – they have 120V AC here, there are two wires running out of the bathroom wall where the shower pipe comes out. the wires connect to the largish shower head, which has an element inside that heats up the cold water like a toaster does to bread.
no, no one ever got electrocuted doing this.
although once i was standing in the shower ready to turn it on, my feet were in a bit of water, and i flipped the circuit to ‘on’ and felt a miiiiild bit of current running through me. lol
anyways, imagine replacing your 40-80 gallong water heater with a two-cup point-of-use heater. you get the point re reduction of electricity usage.
jeez you could prolly easily run it via a solar panel.
if we need to wash particularly greasy dishes we just heat a bit of water in the kettle, dump it into a bowl with some dishwashing liquid and voila that takes care of that. but normally, cold water suffices for any dishwashing.
btw, has anyone checked into using ‘broken’ solar cells to drastically reduce solar panel costs? i hear they cost only cents on the dollar vis-a-vis non-broken cells, and still output plenty of wattage.

Just *Blackle it. “point-of-use water heaters”gotankless.com/point-of-use-water-heater.html
* Blackle is the low energy version of Google. Because it uses a black screen as opposed to a white screen, it requires less energy. Same search engine.
🙂

The Brits (and presumably Europeans as well) have been using point of use systems for years. Only us with all our “cheap” energy on this side of the Atlantic would come up with and proliferate a stupid idea like holding immense amounts of hot water in a huge tank 24/7.

It really is incredulous to me to see the adoration much of the public holds for Obama
==============
I’ve covered this ground before Myrtle but I guess it needs repeating:It cannot be incredulous. Only humans can be incredulous. However, it can be incredible.
The adoration is incredible.You are incredulous.
Allow me to re-phrase your sentence a couple of ways to drive home the point:I am disinclined to believe* the incredible adoration much of the public holds for Obama.
orI am driven into a state of being incredulous** when I observe the incredible adoration much of the public holds for Obama.* incredulous** incredulity
I, Qshtik, am incredulous at the failure of otherwise intelligent people to recognize the difference between incredible and incredulous and between jive and jibe, etc.

Thanks. I stand corrected. BTW, happy 70th, whenever it comes.
==============
You’re welcome … and I appreciate your not flipping out on me. My 70th, if I make it that far, arrives 4 days before Thanksgiving.

I didn’t vote for McCain. I voted against Obama. It was patently obvious in 2008 that he would continue the idiotic monetary policies of Bush and the Fed–which he has not only done but expanded upon even beyond what I ever considered to be rational. The whole TPTB mob is 180 degrees out of phase with reality.

Why? Because diversity is weakness – that’s why they say it is strength. And it is strength – for them. Our credit is their debit. It’s as simple as that. They get to rule over a diverse, divided, squabbling multi-hued rabble, always playing one against the other. For now, that means all colors against the most powerful group, the Whites. But other conflicts are coming, and are already here but kept quiet by the media. Fighting for turf has already broken out in California and New York City between the Blacks and Hispanics. The Blacks don’t stand a chance and are already begining the long march back to their future homeland in the South. Many Blacks are quite openly against illegal immigration but their voice is not being expressed by the establishment Black Grievance Coalition – which is in cahoots with the White Establishment.
Anyway, that’s the big picture. Closer to the ground, each Party has gotten its own perks from the influx. The Republicans get cheap labor and the Democrats get votes. Also the Krugman Slug type intellectuals have some vague idea that the hundred million “new people” they bring in by 2050 are going to support the aged White Population. Dream on. There is not and will not be enough jobs for them and they are going on welfare in huge numbers. Also when they get power, as the Hispanics are in the Southwest, they are not going to support alot of old Whites. They intend to create their own Nation, even if only a defacto one. They want to suck off every thing they can from us and outright independence might threaten that. Yet the idea of independence is intoxicating and they might not be able to resist – especially with Mexico imploding. So it’s really up in the air which way it will go. Not our way in any case speaking as a White American.
Asoka’s more is better idea: size is overrated. He might want to meditate on the concept of “per capita” and stop believing in Reaganesque ideas of the trickle down. Also he might want to consider the idea of environmental limitatations and thus limits to growth. It’s amazing that anyone on Kunstler.com has be told about this kind of thing, but Asoka is really a special case; special as in Special Olympics.

apropos of nothing in particular Fidel is saying that communism is a failure:ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20100909/castro-communism-100909/
And no, the failure doesn’t stem from the US embargo. The embargo didn’t help but Cuba could’ve traded with us in Canada and other countries. We have everything they need and we have no embargo. Our tourists and the currency they dump there have been keeping Cuba afloat for a long time. My parents have vacationed in Cuba. My mother picked up a nasty stomach bug there and it took months to shake it off. Other than that they said it was great.
So Hope and Change for Cuba?

There was an excellent program on a while ago (I think by CBC but I need to dig a little more) about Cuba’s adaptation to the cutting off of oil by the Soviets back in 1989 with urban farming.
So for all those relocalization/organic advocates, this is a good news story. This is what I could find easily.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/04/world/main4154650.shtml
Cash.. where are you located?

I’m not going to comment on diversity with respect to race except to say that any ideology that encourages tribalism within national boundaries is looking for trouble and will find it. I’ve heard of Sotomayor referred to as Latina/Hispanic many times but not even once as an American. Pathetic.
What I think is really dangerous is “groupthink” or a lack of intellectual diversity. We see what happens when a critical mass of people think that owning real estate is a no-lose proposition. We also saw what happened ten years ago to the NASDAQ when dogshit tech and internet stocks were being peddled without any discernable business plan or record of earnings or dividends. Where were the naysayers? Warren Buffett was one lonely voice and he refused to buy into fashionable investing ideas. He was ridiculed and according to the avant garde, Warren “didn’t get it”. What the avant garde and huge numbers of people “didn’t get” was that there was nothing to “get”.
So I agree that the lack of common national and cultural identity the United States is deliberately fostering is extremely ill advised. It will end in disaster. How do I know? Do I have a crystal ball? No. But just look at history and current events.
But diversity in thought and opinion is necessary. People are sheep. They follow the herd right over the cliff. We need more independent thinkers, second guessers, naysayers, voices in the wilderness and people shouting from the roof tops. Otherwise you get people thinking along the same lines with no one to snap them back to reality and you end up with fiascos like the Bay of Pigs invasion and its modern incarnation the Iraqi WMD mirage.

Exactly my point, Myrtle. Asoka makes
the outrageous accusation that I don’t
know what TARP is and that it is only
for banker rescue. Then he proceeds
IN THAT VERY SAME post to talk about
TARP repayment and the segueing of
repaid funds to other projects.
In other words, he makes the claim that
I’m an idiot for implying that TARP is
not for anything but toxic assets and
then proceeds to disprove HIS OWN SELF.
How can one debate with such people?
E.

‘Blacks don’t stand a chance’..
you call them blacks, i call them citizens..
ms13 gang calls them ‘ targets ‘ [ in spanish]
yes WE Citizens dont stand a chance!
ARE YOU GOING TO BURN A KORAN SUNDAY?
that preachers gotten 100+ death threats…not one govt official says he has the freedom of expression to ‘ give em hell’.govt all anti burn a koran.

I wish Peak Oil were the only problem we are facing.
islamic culture and its ‘ right’ to move to the usa [ burkas, honor killings] disgust many…
but honor killings get less publicity than book burning…hes gotten 100+ d